Letting ideas flow into your next presentation, paper or book.
Markdown meets the power of LaTeX in this modern typesetting system.
Thanks for sharing, looks really cool! Especially with how prevalent markdown is.
Hopefully this isn’t too off topic/thread derailing:
As a longtime LaTeX enjoyer, lately I’ve become increasingly infatuated by Typst. With Excalidraw quickly winning my favour as well …
However I find myself daydreaming of some of Obsidian’s powerfull features for knowledge graphing/“second brain”-ing, but given various reasons, never successfully convinced myself to use it. (Primarily: markdown seemingly a bit too simplistic for my preference, and Obsidian, to my knowledge, not being open source(?))
Instead I’ve tried some alternatives, each with excellent ideas, unfortunately none really hitting home with my wierd brain.e.g. Zim, LogSeq, SiYuan, ...
As such I’m curious to hear about others’ setup, and thoughts. - Is Some(Quarkdown + Obsidian) perhaps what I’ve truly been longing for for?
As a Typst enjoyer I have to say this isn’t it imo from a quick look at the readme. Typst’s mix of markup and code modes is excellently designed and a high bar for anything to beat, and this looks like it doesn’t come remotely close. (I do have to say, I also heavily dislike Markdown in general)
Looking through some of the docs I’m afraid I won’t be able to move off of Typst to this either. Typst has a long standing bug that I would have liked to avoid (lists that are too long will overflow memory and the maintainers seem to not want to temporarily dump to disk) but if even rust has an issue with those 100k+ row lists, I’m not sure kotlin will handle it better.
Lists with 100k items? Impressive. I can see how with a document like that it will run out of memory. Is it a stack overflow? You could try increasing the stack size in that case.
FWIW, I was hesitant about obsidian for the same reasons. I would’ve preferred an open source editor and a syntax like asciidoc. But the fact that everything is markdown and it being such a common standard does make obsidian being closed source more palatable[1]. And tbh, for note-taking/“second brain” purposes, a relatively constrained format like markdown is pretty suitable. I wouldn’t want it for technical writing but it serves the purpose for quick and dirty tasks like quickly jotting down notes[2]. And any other markdown language wouldn’t have the same amount of tooling (e.g. org-mode is underspecified and essentially emacs-only unless you see stick to a specific subset of features)
see the creator’s blog post: “File Over App” ↩︎
in an ideal world a more sane/context-free syntax like Djot would have been nice ↩︎
Trillium Notes Next is a good open-source obsidian alternative without the bullet points of logseq.
Have you tried org-mode in emacs? It’s got everything and more! You have zettelkast-style note taking, journal, agenda, spreadsheets and a bunch of other stuff. And everything is saved in text files.
Emacs really is a great operating system!
Did you try Silverbullet? I tried a lot of the stuff you mentioned, but aside from the poor documentation, this hits the sweet spot between power use and carefree for me.
Damn typesetting sounds like such a cool term. Makes me think you’re picking up each letter and putting them… actually wait is that literally what it used to mean? Putting letters in a printing press?
Yes, and it was a renowned job up until the late 90s/early 2000s. The job transformed drastically in the early 80s with upcoming new techniques (e.g. phototypesetting, the predecessor to digital typeset).
Without typesetters, a major role in terms of grammar and design checks broke away. This isn’t the only factor, but since early 2000s, typos where everywhere.
It can’t be worse than tex!
I tried to install it on linux but it seems there is not much documentation on setting it up after installing the latest zip file, and I don’t have much experience manually figuring out where these bin and lib files go in order for it to work.
I just want some doc language that handles conditional sections sanely and has useful appendix tools.