I want to use Markdown for writing university documents, but it lacks features such as table of contents, list of figures, and reference lists.
HTML is not something I would choose for output format, since it doesn’t know the height of a page. Personally, I’d love to see a Markdown-language with some “university extensions”. It should have a fast compiler written in C or Go. It should output a PDF, follow the APA Style – well, that’s what we’re supposed to follow at my university in Norway. All of this can be modularized. Perhaps Markdown with macro support would solve the problem. Maybe it already exists? I’m learning troff right now so that I can write man-pages. It seems like a nice enough language. I have used LaTeX for university work earlier, and the result was really nice. I do find LaTeX and troff hard to get into. I am not able to fully express what I feel about this, but it has something to do with the documentation. It’s more inaccessible compared to Markdown and HTML. LaTeX in itself isn’t that hard, but the whole ecosystem around it feels scary.
