this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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Sure, markdown is great for basic formatting and simple structure. Actual typesetting is a completely different problem domain though.
It's not exactly the appropriate tool for having your math-heavy doctoral dissertation or latest book published. I wouldn't base my printed business correspondence on markdown either.
That's completely fair! I was just noting that notepad++ and some whitespace has almost entirely replaced Word in my writing workflow, since I don't tend to write anything with the intent of printing it (mostly just personal notes and programming documentation). Plus, my train of thought was along the lines of a bulleted outline that's meant to be replaced in situ with actual writing.
That said, I have used LaTeX a bit though and I remember it being super neat once I got the hang of it! I had some grad school papers that needed journal style formatting and slapping an import at the top of the file and moving on with my life was far and away easier than fighting with Word. Come to think of it, it might be worth taking a stab at formatting my resume with LaTeX, just to see if document parsers have an easier time with it...
Oh, I quite agree. Always use the right tool for the job. As Einstein put it, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".
If you're thinking of jumping back into typesetting because you have the occasional need for that too, you might want to have a quick look at the aforementioned Typst, which aims to be a modernized successor to LaTeX. It can't compete with the sheer volume of work people have done in TeX over the years to typeset everything from manuals to orchestral note sheets, but it is considerably more humane to work with. In the simplest use cases, it's not that far from markdown, really. It's also very nice that content and presentation is entirely decoupled.
I think chances are good that you'd like it.
Write in Markdown, convert to LaTeX, typst, Word, Google doc at some point. Markdown usually doesn't have an index function (which makes sense since it doesn't have pages) but you've already done all the work with headers and subheads. Maybe add a newpage / pagebreak here and there and Bob's your uncle.
The only thing missing from markdown is comments.
Uh, I suppose you could do that in very simple situations where you don't need any layout control or advanced typography and just want to nicely typeset some text for print or distribution.
As for the only thing missing from markdown being comments: Sorry, but I can't follow you there. CTAN currently hosts 6827 packages written by 3105 contributors, all of which covers things markdown cannot even remotely do.
Similarly, Typst currently has 478 contributed packages.
Don't take that as criticism. Markdown isn't meant to do any of those things.