Polytype: A Rosetta Stone for typesetting engines (opens in new tab)

> Markdown is not a typesetting engine. It is a markup language. What pandoc does is convert the markdown syntax into LaTeX syntax and then run a TeX engine to produce the desired PDF.

If we're going to go that route, neither is LaTeX a typesetting engine; it is a macro package built on the typesetting engine of TeX.

There's a meaningful distinction between the typesetting engine and the markup or interface you use to typeset documents. This project seems only concerned with the underlying engines. But for example go look at a raw groff file, it's obviously not intended to be written by hand and no one does. Latex on the other hand is a complete system, with a language to set documents and an engine to render them.

Html + css or markdown for that matter are only the interface layer, to compare them this way you'd need to specify an implementation. Minute typographic details are still one of the places where browsers diverge from each other in their behavior.

paged.js and weasyprint ingest HTML, as shown in the helloworld example.