Supercharge Your Docs: Explore Quarkdown, the Next‑Gen Markdown Engine

Project Overview

Quarkdown is a modern typesetting system built on Markdown. It retains Markdown’s simplicity, plain‑text nature, and version‑control friendliness, while adding a Turing‑complete syntax extension that lets you write functions, define variables, use conditionals and loops, and even call external libraries.

It can generate multiple output formats—including HTML pages, PDF documents, reveal.js‑based slides, and paged.js‑based books—with a single command.

On GitHub the project has earned over 7.5 K stars.

Key Features

Enhanced Markdown Syntax : Function calls, variable definitions, conditional statements, and loops give Markdown dynamic content generation capabilities.

Multi‑Target Output : Export to HTML, PDF, presentation slides, and books; PDF export preserves all HTML styling.

Live Preview & Fast Compilation : Built‑in live preview automatically recompiles on changes; compilation is extremely fast.

Rich Standard Library & Extensions : Provides layout building, math, file handling, and allows custom functions, shared libraries, and team collaboration.

Modular & Cross‑Platform Design : Plugin‑based architecture; Java implementation runs on all major operating systems.

Powerful Layout Control : Advanced page margins, borders, centering, and support for charts, formulas, and code blocks.

Quick Installation

Ensure Java 17 or higher is installed. Download the latest Quarkdown release archive, or build it yourself with

gradlew distZip

. After extracting, add the

bin

directory to your system

PATH

.

Basic Usage

Wizard mode (recommended for beginners) :

quarkdown create my-book

This creates a basic project scaffold. Inside the

my-book

folder you will find

.qmd

files that you can edit directly.

Live preview :

quarkdown c main.qmd -p -w

The

-p

flag starts a web server and opens the preview in a browser;

-w

watches for file changes and refreshes automatically.

Compile output :

# Generate HTML
quarkdown c my_book/main.qmd

# Generate PDF with live preview
quarkdown c my_book/main.qmd --pdf -p

Conclusion

Quarkdown fully exploits Markdown’s potential. It keeps the ease of Markdown while adding programmability and rich features, making it suitable for technical blogs, academic papers, or presentation decks.

Project URL

https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown