Quarkdown, a modern, Turing-complete, Markdown-based typesetting system, now finally supports exporting to PDF
Posted by iamgioh@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 11 comments
hoedownsergeant@reddit
I'm using Quarto with RStudio and I have run into trouble with LateX export. Could I use Quarkdown for generating PDFs?
iamgioh@reddit (OP)
As far as I know Quarto has interactive code snippets, right? Quarkdown doesn’t (and won’t) have those. But if you’re not using them and just generating a static document à la LaTeX, you can give it a shot!
hoedownsergeant@reddit
Well, it depends.
Interactivity is not really the use-case for me in Quarto - what it does is , it can process different programming languages , show the code and it's output. However, I reckon that Quarkdown would come into effect one step later (when it comes to rendering).
It looks great!
iamgioh@reddit (OP)
You can show code with automatic syntax highlighting, but the output isn’t evaluated automatically. It is something I thought about but I need some time to design it securely and vulnerability-proof. Question: would you evaluate code at compile time or client-side, interactively with a button, at runtime?
hoedownsergeant@reddit
Quarto is more like an engine , that wraps different stuff. Quarto creates a RMd file (I think), that is then used by pandoc for example, to render it to docx or by miktex to render it to latex etc
The thing is , that different formats require different specifications.
If I want to have a nice table for my html report, it will not render as nicely to pdf or html.
This probably goes beyond the scope of this reply - Quarto is quite good but LaTeX does my head in, especially with figures and tables.
iamgioh@reddit (OP)
Got it, thank you! Quarkdown’s PDF export is based on Puppeteer, which is based on Chrome. The result you get as PDF is exactly the same that you would see when rendering the HTML on Chrome.
blind_ninja_guy@reddit
What does this used for math output? Or is that not supported yet? Boy, if this does support math output and equations, it'd be stupidly nice for building up a quick math presentation. I know tools like Jupiter or colab can do it in markdown directly, but being able to output PDF and HTML document with accessible math formula in HTML mode would be super nice.
iamgioh@reddit (OP)
Hi, it does! I noticed a PDF math rendering bug just yesterday and it’s already in the works. It works well in HTML still.
blind_ninja_guy@reddit
Dang, I wish I had had this when I was in college. Super cool project.
iamgioh@reddit (OP)
I love that compliment :) The fix was just pushed, by the way
randomguy4q5b3ty@reddit
This is bloody genius! Thank you for your hard work! Death to LaTex!