Just a quick note to say that someone has implemented a (very crude at this stage) Markdown to LaTeX converter, and I’m jealous. He’s way ahead of me here, in that I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now, and actually getting it done gets the credit.
Actually, my implementation was going to be written in TeX, just to see if I could do it — I have a feeling that it might not very robust in the end, but then again the requirements aren’t particularly great.
I suspect that his method (or proposed final method, rather) of keeping Markdown a perl script that transforms the output to LaTeX is the best idea.
Now that I think of it, txt2tags is a similar program to Markdown, but which converts to LaTeX (among others) as well as HTML, so it’s really even better than Markdown, if you’ll excuse its slightly less elegant syntax (and I mean “slightly”).
Hmmm. Should check that out, since it totally doesn’t get enough kudos, at least, if it is indeed as good as it looks. I guess that’s the problem with invention: the best salesman always wins; and John Gruber sure knows how to put a nice wrapper on things and is read by a whole lot of people.