> TeX itself is not really complex

I'm not sure if we're getting hung up on the word "complex", but here's 60+ pages on paragraph line breaking alone:

http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf

Digital Typography is 700 pages long (not everything is going to be TeX fundamentals, but...):

https://archive.org/details/digitaltypograph0000knut/page/n7...

The 66-page "Breaking Paragraphs into Lines" is a research paper, and much of it is is the "complexity" of the problem itself, rather than TeX's elegant solution in particular (e.g. pages 48–59 are about history). In a sense, the generality shown in the paper (the various different things that TeX's algorithm can accomplish) shows how TeX reduces the real-world complexity of typesetting with a simple approach that covers all of them.

The book "Digital Typography" is, somewhat misleadingly, not a book that was written about digital typography, but simply a collection (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/selected.html) of several papers that Knuth wrote about TeX and Metafont and some related topics, over several decades.

Maybe the several hundred pages of the "Computers and Typesetting" series would be a better example for your point: https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html

In any case, I agree with the comment you're replying to: if you use TeX itself without dragging behind you the entire ecosystem and all the packages (in particular, use plain TeX rather than LaTeX) you'll see it's not really complex, and the implementation is fine. Especially today, with things like LuaTeX scripting (and, say, opTeX) it is feasible to bypass LaTeX and packages and do things yourself — that is, unless external circumstances require you to use LaTeX and packages etc, which is still often the case (e.g. submitting papers to journals).

Working as a mathematician, the math notation is 100% why I use (La)TeX. Packages are just a bonus.

amsthm, mathtools, etc.? I doubt one can survive long in typesetting math without the La part of TeX.

I think the argument comes down to complexity. Getting Markdown --> Pandoc featureset up to a reasonable fidelity is the next stage IMO, especially if Markdown can be made to support the most common downloaded TeX extension packages.

Not going to happen. If you look at the CommonMark discussions, you will find people adamant that X features not be included for varying reasons.

I think the best future option is going to be djot[0]. It is being created by the author of pandoc, who might possibly be the most qualified person in the world to appreciate all if the nuances of marking up text and parsing it.

[0] https://www.djot.net/

djot syntax looks just like Pandoc’s markdown. What’s the difference?

Clean slate design. I think pandoc markdown is a superset of markdown, which must parse the ambiguous parts of the spec. Djot has a goal to eliminate the corner cases and be able to represent all things without requiring the html escape hatch (eg bold text within a word).

The rationale page can do a better job than myself. https://github.com/jgm/djot#rationale

Thanks, that makes sense. Although I’d like to point out that one of the listed problems with commonmark, and the problem you mention, are not problems with Pandoc markdown:

    : echo "word**withboldtext**inside" | pandoc
    <p>word<strong>withboldtext</strong>inside</p>

    : echo "a*?*b" | pandoc
    <p>a<em>?</em>b</p>

You make markdown support TeX by running it though a tex compiler. The other way around is never in a million years going to happen, because markdown is all about not adding additional markup like \commands, or extensions without which a markdown renderer wouldn't be able to generate the content it's supposed to.

(which is why markdown still doesn't officially have any maths support, only certain non-standard flavours do)

Please keep Markdown simple as it is.

Feel free to come up with something new that supports Markdown as a subset or overlaps with Markdown.

I'm unsure of the naming & organizational conventions for Markdown. Are extensions called flavors? If so, I was envisioning a flavor.

Markdown as-is is lovely.