Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

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Markdown is also missing:

- Diagrams

- Math

- Any custom blocks - like Figures, algorithms, image boxes, etc

- Numbered chapters / sections (Eg Chapter 1, Appendix A, etc).

- Semantic references

For readmes, thats fine I guess. But I miss all those features when I'm writing proper blog posts, articles and documentation.

There are various hacky workarounds. But as soon as you start using bespoke markdown extensions, you're locked out of 95% of the markdown tooling out there. And everything feels so janky.

I'm looking forward to Typst's HTML output getting more mature. Typst is the only typesetting tool I've ever used that is both enjoyable to use and powerful enough for the kind of documents I want to write. It manages that by being a full on programming language. You can define variables and write custom functions for reused blocks. And there is an ecosystem of 3rd party typst packages. For a paper I wrote recently, my benchmarking tool spat the results into a JSON file. My document loaded that JSON data directly, and used the benchmarking results to populate charts and tables in the paper. It was crazy cool.

Mermaid charts! Supported by github and very readable as plaintext

https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...

I put that in the "hacky workarounds" category.

Does it work at all? Yeah. Does it work in my markdown editor? Probably not. Does it work in my markdown renderer? I don't know. Which version of Mermaid does it work with? Probably a different version of mermaid on every platform. Can I save my mermaid diagram to a file and link it instead of inlining the mermaid diagram inline? Who knows. Flip a coin everywhere mermaid is supported.

I tried pushing a markdown renderer to the limits once - only to find out that the markdown renderer I was using doesn't correctly implement commonmark, and my markdown file breaks with every other markdown renderer I've tried it with. To say nothing of the custom extensions I tried to use.

At this stage I'd rather keep my markdown files simple, and use something better for real documents. Something like typst.

Markdown should not do diagrams/math etc.

People just started doing all kinds of extensions and for me that’s silly.

> Markdown should not do diagrams/math etc.

Fine. But in that case, markdown is the wrong tool for blogging and documentation. I want to write rich and interesting content. Markdown is anaemic.

i do believe obsidian support all those (well maybe not all)

but thats added 'on top' of basic markdown, so when you open your markdown file in some other program it looks weird

More importantly, when that specific plugin stops being maintained/updated, you’ll have Markdown files which can’t be properly presented/read.

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