> Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience.
Fully agree with this, and having typeset my masters thesis and later my resume using LaTeX, I think that the “authoring experience” is definitely the place to focus on improving, LaTeX just takes too damn long to get something good.
If you’re interested in the “markup to document publishing” space, you might also be interested in the open-source report publishing tool I’m now working on, Evidence.dev (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence).
It’s similarly based on markdown, though uses code fences to execute code, HTML style tags for charts and components, and {…} for JavaScript, i.e.
---
title: Lorem Ipsum
description: dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit
---
```sql petal_vs_sepal
SELECT
petal_length,
sepal_length
FROM iris_dataset_table
ORDER BY 1 DESC
```
<ScatterPlot
title="Petal vs Sepal Length"
data={petal_vs_sepal}
x=petal_length
y=sepal_length
/>
The longest petal in the dataset is {petal_vs_sepal[0].petal_length}.
Our design philosophy here is that the rendered documents should be beautiful by default, but highly configurable so you can get pixel perfect results.
We’re also aiming for first class output options for desktop, mobile, PDF and image export.
Fully agree with this, and having typeset my masters thesis and later my resume using LaTeX, I think that the “authoring experience” is definitely the place to focus on improving, LaTeX just takes too damn long to get something good.
If you’re interested in the “markup to document publishing” space, you might also be interested in the open-source report publishing tool I’m now working on, Evidence.dev (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence).
It’s similarly based on markdown, though uses code fences to execute code, HTML style tags for charts and components, and {…} for JavaScript, i.e.
Our design philosophy here is that the rendered documents should be beautiful by default, but highly configurable so you can get pixel perfect results.We’re also aiming for first class output options for desktop, mobile, PDF and image export.
Previous HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 - 91 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 - 97 comments