I used (and will continue to use) most of those. Quick rules of thumb:

- markdown is .txt with just a tiny bit of syntactic sugar/syntax highlighting, and you can export it to pdf or html

- quarto is markdown-but-I-want-to-execute-code-blocks-inside

- typst is latex but modern, with 90% less cruft and 10% less functionality (academia, hating everything modern, will also hate you if you use typst)

- pandoc is how you export to pdf/html/whatever

By and large, it’s obvious which tool is needed when. There’s of course more, like asciidoc, but I struggle to think what isn’t being covered by the markdown/quarto/typst combo. Some wysiwyg editor maybe?

I really wanted to like Typst. No more latex would be fantastic. Decided to use it for a project, and had to give up and return to latex, just too many corner cases. Both things its missing from latex, and lack of Pandoc convertibility. Really hope it gets the last 10%

Consider djot for the comparison list too.

It seems like a well designed and thorough superset of markdown.

https://djot.net/

You mean like this? https://github.com/iamgio/quarkdown#comparison

Pandoc lives in a different tier because it gives you arbitrary filters so you can do any transformation you want on the intermediate JSON format. And it converts anything to and from that JSON format. So I prefer Pandoc based systems because anything the tool doesn't do that you want is probably implementable with a simple inline filter.

> a comparison of all these tools/markup languages

It can take a long time to draft such comparisons; I crafted one for my own Markdown editor, which uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX:

https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/

Feel free to use it as a starting point for your own research.

I don't think Typst fits in this list. They never claim to be some sort of markdown or have any overlap with it, and their core product is the compiler, not the language. Just because they added some syntactic sugar that sometimes somewhat resembles markdown doesn't make it a competitor.

Asciidoc was the sweet spot of features and readability for me. Really wish it had more tooling.

- paged.js[0] heeds the slow crawl towards the CSS paged media module, eventually allowing some truly great page-setting DX out-of-the box which it currently polyfills.

[0]: https://pagedjs.org

I've produced a staggering variety of documents with Typst. Books, booklets, slides, cards, documentation, everything. In most cases I only need a minimum of custom styles and behaviors at the top, and very occasionally a whole styling module. Blows the rest of these tools out of the water full stop.

Yeah, I would really like if people who introduce a new project to an already very crowded space would start the introduction with "Why MyCoolProject instead of X?" section.

I am currently enjoying WYSIWYG with GNU TeXmacs for long-form or scientific text editing. Both, the concept and the tool, are amazingly capable and a breath of fresh air after all the LaTex, Markdown, Org s …

Thanks. The list also includes https://mdxjs.com/, which I have never heard of.