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Table of contents

1. About
2. Demo
3. Editor extensions
4. Targets
5. Comparison
6. Getting started
   1. Installation
   2. Quickstart
   3. Creating a project
   4. Compiling
7. Mock document
8. Contributing
9. Sponsors
10. Concept
11. License

 

About

Quarkdown is a modern Markdown-based typesetting system designed for versatility. It allows a single project to compile seamlessly into a print-ready book, academic paper, knowledge base, or interactive presentation. All through an incredibly powerful Turing-complete extension of Markdown, ensuring your ideas flow automatically into paper.

 

Original credits: Attention Is All You Need

Born as an extension of CommonMark and GFM, the Quarkdown Flavor brings functions to Markdown, along with many other syntax extensions.

This is a function call:

.somefunction {arg1} {arg2}
    Body argument

Possibilities are unlimited thanks to an ever-expanding standard library, which offers layout builders, I/O, math, conditional statements and loops.

Not enough? You can still define your own functions and variables, all within Markdown. You can even create awesome libraries for everyone to use.

.function {greet}
    to from:
    **Hello, .to** from .from!

.greet {world} from:{iamgio}

Result: Hello, world from iamgio!

This out-of-the-box scripting support opens doors to complex and dynamic content that would be otherwise impossible to achieve with vanilla Markdown.

Combined with live preview, ⚡ fast compilation speed and great editor support, Quarkdown simply gets the work done, whether it's an academic paper, book, knowledge base or interactive presentation.

 

 

In a nutshell, Quarkdown is...

• Familiar: built on the well-known Markdown syntax, for a flat learning curve
• Elegant: produces output that matches the quality of industry-leading tools
• Agent-friendly: comes with a built-in skill for idiomatic fluency of your coding agents (read the eval)
• Customizable: full control over document layout, aesthetics, and properties
• Secure by default: a restrictive permission system limits access to system resources
• Versatile: a single source compiles to multiple targets
• Reactive: low-latency live previews for rapid iteration. The official wiki (100+ subdocuments) compiles in ~2 seconds
• Reusable: repeated content can be turned into one-line function calls
• Easily deployable: set a CD workflow up in under 3 minutes (example)

 

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Looking for something?

Check out the wiki to get started and learn more about the language and its features!

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As simple as you expect...

Inspired by: X-ray flashes from a nearby supermassive black hole accelerate mysteriously

 

...as complex as you need.

Editor extensions

• VS Code
• IntelliJ IDEA (unofficial by @CarmJos)

 

Targets

• HTML

  • Plain
    Continuous flow like Notion/Obsidian, perfect for static websites and knowledge management - check out the author's personal website.

  • Paged ^{via paged.js}
    Perfect for papers, articles and books - check out the demo document.

  • Slides ^{via reveal.js}
    Perfect for interactive presentations.

  • Docs
    Perfect for wikis, technical documentation and large knowledge bases - check out Quarkdown's wiki.

• PDF

  • All document types and features supported by HTML are also supported when exporting to PDF.

• Markdown

  • GFM export.

• Plain text

The desired document type can be set by calling the .doctype function within the source itself:

• .doctype {plain} (default)
• .doctype {paged}
• .doctype {slides}
• .doctype {docs}

 

Comparison

	Quarkdown	LaTeX	Typst	AsciiDoc	MDX
Concise and readable	✅	❌	✅	✅	✅
Full document control1	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
Scripting	✅	Partial	✅	❌	✅
Book/article export	✅	✅	✅	✅	Third-party
Presentation export	✅	✅	✅	✅	Third-party
Static site export	✅	❌	Experimental	✅	✅
Docs/wiki export	✅	❌	❌	✅	✅
Learning curve	🟢	🔴	🟠	🟢	🟢
Targets	HTML, PDF, MD, TXT	PDF, PostScript	HTML, PDF	HTML, PDF, ePub	HTML

LaTeX

Quarkdown

\tableofcontents \section{Section} \subsection{Subsection} \begin{enumerate} \item \textbf{First} item \item \textbf{Second} item \end{itemize} \begin{center} This text is \textit{centered}. \end{center} \begin{figure}[!h] \centering \begin{subfigure}[b] \includegraphics[width=0.3\linewidth]{img1.png} \end{subfigure} \begin{subfigure}[b] \includegraphics[width=0.3\linewidth]{img2.png} \end{subfigure} \begin{subfigure}[b] \includegraphics[width=0.3\linewidth]{img3.png} \end{subfigure} \end{figure}

.tableofcontents # Section ## Subsection 1. **First** item 2. **Second** item .center This text is _centered_. .row alignment:{spacebetween}   

 

Getting started

Installation

Install script (Linux/macOS)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/quarkdown-labs/get-quarkdown/refs/heads/main/install.sh | sudo env "PATH=$PATH" bash

Root privileges let the script install Quarkdown into /opt/quarkdown and its wrapper script into /usr/local/bin/quarkdown.
The browser required for PDF export is installed automatically.

For more installation options, check out get-quarkdown.

Homebrew (Linux/macOS)

brew install quarkdown-labs/quarkdown/quarkdown

Install script (Windows)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/quarkdown-labs/get-quarkdown/refs/heads/main/install.ps1 | iex

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add quarkdown https://github.com/quarkdown-labs/scoop-quarkdown; scoop install quarkdown

GitHub Actions

See setup-quarkdown to easily integrate Quarkdown into your GitHub Actions workflows.

Manual installation

Instructions for manual installation

Download quarkdown.zip from the latest stable release and unzip it, or build it with gradlew installDist.

Optionally, adding <install_dir>/bin to your PATH allows you easier access Quarkdown.

Requirements:

• (Only for PDF export) A Chromium-family browser, such as chrome-headless-shell. See PDF export for details.

 

Quickstart

New user? You'll find everything you need in the Quickstart guide to bring your first document to life!

 

Creating a project

quarkdown create [directory] will launch the prompt-based project wizard, making it quicker than ever to set up a new Quarkdown project, with all metadata and initial content already present.

 

Compiling

Running quarkdown c file.qd will compile the given file and save the output to file.

If the project is composed by multiple source files, the target file must be the root one, i.e. the one that includes the other files.

• How to include other files?

If you would like to familiarize yourself with Quarkdown instead, quarkdown repl lets you play with an interactive REPL mode.

Options

The most commonly used options are:

• -p or --preview: enables automatic content reloading after compiling.

• -w or --watch: recompiles the source every time a file from the source directory is changed.

Tip

Combine -p -w to achieve live preview!

• --pdf: produces a PDF file. Learn more in the wiki's PDF export page.

For the full list of options, check out the CLI options wiki page.

 

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Mock document

 

Mock, written in Quarkdown, is a comprehensive collection of visual elements offered by the language, making it ideal for exploring and understanding its key features — all while playing and experimenting hands-on with a concrete outcome in the form of pages or slides.

• The document's source files are available in the mock directory, and can be compiled via quarkdown c mock/main.qd -p.
• The PDF artifacts generated for all possible theme combinations are available and can be viewed in the generated repo.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please check CONTRIBUTING.md to know how contribute via issues or pull requests.

Sponsors

A special thanks to all the sponsors who supported this project!

 

Concept

The logo resembles the original Markdown icon, with focus on Quarkdown's completeness, richness of features and customization options, emphasized by the revolving arrow all around the sphere.

What could be mistaken for a planet is actually a quark or, more specifically, a down quark, an elementary particle that is a major constituent of matter: they give life to every complex structure we know of, while also being one of the lightest objects in existence.

This is, indeed, the concept Quarkdown is built upon.

License

By default, Quarkdown and its modules are licensed under GNU GPLv3, except for modules that include their own LICENSE file: the CLI (quarkdown-cli) and Language Server (quarkdown-lsp) modules and binaries are licensed under GNU AGPLv3.

Footnotes

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1. The ability to customize the properties of the document and of its output artifact through the language itself. ↩︎