To use Markdown as LaTeX's substitute

I am trying to write a white paper for my database project by Markdown.

However, I have already had several problems from TOC generation to getting content in A4 -format.

I know LaTeX. However, my small experiment has shown me that Markdown has its flaws to be used in the production of white papers.

Is Markdown LaTeX's substitute in writing non-mathematical white papers for you?

Markdown is not designed for publishing of the LaTeX class.

Here is a short treatise -- Markdown Doesn't Scale (edit: dead link, but available through Internet Archive).

I liked the clearly put,

moral of the story is "use the right tool for the job", or something like that,
"even when the right tool has backslashes."

"Because if you don't, you'll just have to blog about it to admonish fellow coders - er,
document preparers - students? - people - to not make the same mistake."

Yeah, cause I made that mistake. And you shouldn't. Got it? Cool.

There is also another question here -- Markdown versus ReStructuredText (edit: dead as well, Internet Archive to the rescue again) with this good point,

Markdown seems useful if you're mainly interested in generating HTML. ReStructuredText (and the related DocUtils suite) is good if you want to generate other structured output formats (eg LaTeX).

Having used both of these, I would like to have a small translator that will pickup Markup and generate the initial LaTeX source file which can be fine tuned with more LaTeX detail.

See Pandoc.

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, Pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Need to generate a man page from a markdown file? No problem. LaTeX to Docbook? Sure. HTML to MediaWiki? Yes, that too. Pandoc can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, textile, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, textile, groff man pages, Emacs org-mode, EPUB ebooks, and S5 and Slidy HTML slide shows. PDF output (via LaTeX) is also supported with the included markdown2pdf wrapper script.

Maybe MultiMarkDown is the best of both worlds. From the short presentation it seems very suitable, but I don't know if it is still actively developed.