With LaTeX you have a longer learning curve and it is not so handy, but you can make almost anything you can imagine with respect to document formatting, including drawing (diagrams, statistical graphs, chemical formulas, etc.) and there are no LaTeX flavors (Plain TeX or ContTeXt are distinct enough not to cause any confusion). This is enough in many cases but not all, and this explain the why there are so many markdown flavors, adding this or that feature, with the result that it is no longer so easy to use (especially when you will need aware of the differences among markdown flavors).Īdmittedly, even the most complex flavor is still far easier than LaTeX, but still is rather limited. This is not a criticism of markdown: the purpose of the markdown is to be a very lightweight markup language and perforce should be simple code to make a simple format.

Simple formatting options such as centering an image or making two columns are not available. But the paradise vanishes when you need more than standards sections and bulleted list. Any markdown flavor is indeed a better option than LaTeX to focus on contents and format a document easily with a decent format, no doubt.

Using latex in macdown