quarkdown

Quarkdown is a tool for writing documents using an expanded version of Markdown. Markdown is a simple way to format plain text with a few symbols, often used for notes and web pages. Quarkdown takes that familiar format and adds more power, so a single source file can be turned into different kinds of finished documents: a print ready book, an academic paper, a website, a knowledge base, or an interactive slideshow.

The big difference from plain Markdown is that Quarkdown adds functions. A function is a small named command you can call inside your text, written with a dot and curly braces, that produces some result. The README shows examples where you define your own function, such as a greeting, and then call it with arguments to generate text. There is a built in standard library offering layout tools, input and output, math, and even conditions and loops, and you can write your own functions and share them as libraries. The authors describe the language as Turing complete, meaning it can express any computation.

The README lists the output formats, called targets. It can produce HTML in several styles: a continuous flowing page like Notion or Obsidian, a paged layout for papers and books, slides for presentations, and a documentation style for wikis. All of these can also be exported to PDF, and plain text is supported too. You choose the type with a doctype command inside the file.

A comparison table sets Quarkdown against other tools like LaTeX, Typst, AsciiDoc, and MDX. It also mentions live preview, fast compilation, and a Visual Studio Code extension.