[HN Gopher] Pandoc
___________________________________________________________________
Pandoc
Author : swatson741
Score : 571 points
Date : 2024-01-28 09:41 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pandoc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (pandoc.org)
| jackhalford wrote:
| Love this, been using it for years to write markdown as a base
| and then transform to html or pdf using latex for maths.
| fforflo wrote:
| Pandoc is a great cli tool in terms of its UI and code quality.
| An interesting fact is that its creator is John MacFarlane, a
| Philosopher [0]
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_MacFarlane_(philosopher...
| uhoh-itsmaciek wrote:
| And a damn fine bluegrass fiddler [0]!
|
| [0]: https://www.whiskeybrothers.net/wb_bios.html
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| > code quality
|
| It has 995 open issues in its Github repository. Haskell
| program was supposed to work right if it compiles, wasn't it?
| johnday wrote:
| > It has 995 open issues in its Github repository.
|
| This is not a sensible metric for code quality. For one
| thing, only about 20% of the currently open issues are tagged
| as bugs - more than that are suggested improvements.
|
| > Haskell program was supposed to work right if it compiles,
| wasn't it?
|
| No. _Especially_ for tasks like string manipulation and
| format munging, you cannot capture the complexity of the
| domain into types.
| Mikhail_K wrote:
| 20 % of 1000 is 200 . Pandoc has been stuck at this number
| of issues for years.
|
| >> Haskell program was supposed to work right if it
| compiles,
|
| >> wasn't it?
|
| >No.
|
| I seem to remember differently.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| As is generally the case, there are official docker images
| readily available and it's a fantastically light, low-coupling
| way of adding conversion to a stack.
|
| Recently rewrote a content stack to use Markdown (among other
| formats) for the source, the file system as the database,
| generating outputs (including HTML with embedded Mathjax LATEX)
| via pandoc, and it works absolutely brilliantly. Fully recommend.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Why do you use the docker image instead of just the normal
| executable?
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I'd reckon it's partly habit, but it is a very nice way of
| "installing" something easily and being able to also very
| easily _uninstall_ it without leaving any cruft behind, as
| well as having completely disparate multiple versions of
| things, if you need that.
|
| For single-file binaries this is less of an issue, but even
| those sometimes require dependencies that you already have
| something else that needs a different version of that same
| dependency causing conflict.
| mekster wrote:
| What distro doesn't have pandoc in its package manager?
| llm_nerd wrote:
| A better question is why _wouldn 't_ I use the docker image?
| The docker image is an official work output of the project,
| handles all dependencies without messing up my target
| machines (I use the pandoc/extra which includes pretty much
| every ancillary need such as Latex), and is trivial to keep
| up to date and current holistically. It is by default
| isolated and controlled to a degree, and allows me to
| trivially tape together as necessary.
|
| The other comment nailed it pretty well, though they hedged
| it by citing habit (presumably to counter the weird anti-
| docker trend that has arisen). Dockerizing (or simply
| containerizing) most vendored products is a choice that is
| often beneficial, and the marginal overhead is a rounding
| error.
| kugurerdem wrote:
| This is one of the most useful programs that I use.
|
| I use it for turning .md files into .html or .pdf.
|
| I use it for creating slides with it.
|
| I even use it for fixing the hard-wrapped text I write in vim
| before sending emails. When I write in vim, I prefer the text to
| be hard-wrapped, but for emails, I like it better when the text
| is not wrapped. I recommend arp242's essay explaining the problem
| with hard-wrapping [1], but basically the way I workaround this
| problem is using a local script which uses pandoc at some point
| [2].
|
| Overall, pandoc is really good.
|
| [1]: https://www.arp242.net/email-wrapping.html
|
| [2]:
| https://github.com/kugurerdem/dotfiles/blob/2d68357273e1bc30...
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Interesting. And how do you send and read emails? Mutt?
| kugurerdem wrote:
| I used to use Mutt, but now I don't because my email has its
| own special domain, and the email hosting service I use
| doesn't let me export IMAP and POP3 details unless I pay
| them.
|
| Currently, I just open vim in the terminal, write what I
| need, then copy the text. I open dmenu using a shortcut, type
| something like "unwr", which is sufficient for selecting the
| "unwrap-clipboard" script of mine, press enter, which unwraps
| the text on the clipboard. Finally, I paste it in the email
| client.
|
| I know it might seem a bit tricky, but it's better than what
| I did before. I used to set the textwidth to a really large
| number like 9999, highlight the text I wanted to unwrap, and
| then type 'gqq' for formatting. And don't forget, you also
| have to wrap the text back if you don't want to change the
| original format of the text file you wrote.
|
| You can use soft-wrapping in vim, but I don't prefer it.
| Soft-wrapping is not as convenient to me as hard-wrapped text
| when using vim shortcuts. For instance, if you are using
| soft-wrapping in vim and you press 'o,' the insertion mode
| will start at the end of the paragraph because vim will
| consider the entire paragraph as a single line. However,
| there are many situations where I only want to insert text in
| the middle of a paragraph. You will also most likely set j to
| act like gj and k to act like gk, to make the cursor move
| between lines that are visually separated but actually form a
| single line. I don't like this either.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I had a script that piped to curl to send, Mail.app for
| downloading via POP and Vim to read/write, but I gave up
| and ended up copy/pasting as well.
|
| Someday I may try that again, if email is still relevant by
| then. Vim and email would be my perfect set up.
| kugurerdem wrote:
| > I had a script that piped to curl to send, Mail.app for
| downloading via POP and Vim to read/write
|
| Wow, this is very interesting, and I might even try it at
| some point. It might have been a bit challenging to sync
| and read the emails though, but the sending part seems
| nice.
|
| Was the reason for why you gave up related to syninc
| emails?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I liked that Mail.app stored every message as a single
| separate file, instead of the mbox that Thunderbird and
| others did. But at some version they started saving a
| hash with a multiple folder structure and that broke the
| setup. I had a few issues with MIME encoding as well,
| which were probably my fault. It was too much work and I
| eventually gave up, but if I find the will to do it
| again, I'd choose a simple POP downloader + some filter
| (if not in address book or previous recipients, move
| message to "Unknown").
|
| qlmanage worked great for HTML messages and attachments,
| though.
| evanb wrote:
| You might find vim-anywhere what you need. Roughly
| speaking, in almost any text-entry field you can hit a
| hotkey, get a temporary macvim buffer, and when you wq
| the contents are pasted where you came from.
|
| https://github.com/cknadler/vim-anywhere
| andy99 wrote:
| I'll probably lose some nerd cred: I do most of my writing in
| MS word, I find it easier to cut and paste and add footnotes
| and section headers. And then I use Pandoc to convert the docx
| into the format I want, usually HTML*. I used to do markdown in
| vim but I found that for most of what I do I prefer word. I do
| write code in vim...
|
| * I use this css file when converting:
| https://gist.github.com/killercup/5917178
| sixhobbits wrote:
| We do the opposite of this - we write in markdown but
| sometimes need to get feedback in Google Docs. Pandoc doesn't
| convert to google docs so well, but it does to docx, so our
| pipeline is
|
| markdown -> pandoc -> docx -> upload to google doc -> share
| ryanianian wrote:
| My kingdom for proper markdown support in google docs. Just
| let me toggle between wysiwyg vs markdown. Collaboration at
| a tech company using google docs is comically painful at
| times.
| jeffhwang wrote:
| +1 strong agree. I like Google Docs' realtime
| collaborative editing, but the wysiwyg formatting (even
| if one has memorized the keyboard shortcuts) makes it
| hard to be fast the way I am in a Markdown-aware editor
| or vim. Plus I miss my vim motions!
| bostik wrote:
| I'd settle for a Markdown import. You could do your
| editing and writing of raw text in whatever you feel
| happy with, and then have gdocs transform it to its
| supposedly native format on upload.
|
| Gdocs would then really only need to support the same
| semantics with underscores, asterisks, octothorpe heading
| levels and title sizes.
| greenpresident wrote:
| For documents that require a longer process, I prefer formats
| that I can use comments and TODO in, with a text editor that
| feels familiar.
|
| Other than that, I strongly agree. Word is also de facto
| standard when you want others to open and edit your document.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Word has comments. They work well as todo markers if they
| don't need to be retained (just make a comment to mark
| something and then delete it when it is resolved).
| ravi-delia wrote:
| You know what, that's a sufficiently cursed workflow that it
| wraps back around to adding nerd cred
| queuebert wrote:
| Like using a hex editor to build up a Word doc?
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend
| you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the
| fact that writing should happen in "word processing
| software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say
| "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use
| Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an
| IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used
| to type using rolls of paper instead of sheets so he didn't
| have to stop is his process. He "got it".
|
| As for pandoc, yes it's amazing, and I have been using it to
| convert my word documents to markdown so I can publish a
| technical textbook I'm working on using Quarto. I tried
| writing directly in Quarto for a while, but as per my point
| above, it really slowed me down and distracted me from
| actually writing, so I figured out the pandoc pipeline. My
| most favoritest feature so far is that it converts tables AND
| equations to markdown and latex perfectly. It's so seamless
| that I'd actually recommend Word->pandoc as the best way to
| write a complicated markdown table.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Most tech people who use Word know how to use it and that
| is exactly the problem. We don't have the benefit of
| ignorance. We send off drafts to someone for commenting or
| editing and get an inconsistently formatted mess back
| because others don't even know that styles exist and use
| manual / direct formatting instead.
|
| We are the ones that have to suffer because people we are
| forced to collaborate with do not take 5 minutes out of
| their day to learn the basics of a tool they _use
| professionally_.
|
| It is the equivalent of seeing somebody use right-click to
| copy-paste, except it tangibly makes my day worse.
| subtra3t wrote:
| So what you're saying is that the problem with Word is
| that it makes it easy to write unpolished and
| unprofessional documents? In your opinion, is that the
| fault of the word processor or the user? [0]
|
| [0]: Not a rhetoric question that implies one answer to
| be the only "right" one.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I find that question uninteresting, because no matter
| where the fault lies (it's probably somewhere in the
| middle) the end consequence is that there is no use case
| where it makes sense for _me_ to use Word (unless I 'm
| literally held at gunpoint).
|
| I'm either working on a document for myself or with
| collaborators.
|
| In the first case I'll use markdown for simple things or
| LaTeX for bigger things since I can work in a familiar
| environment where I work most efficiently (VSCode).
|
| In the second case, I'll work with collaborators so I
| will never be able to trust that a document I have sent
| off for reading is still consistently formatted when I
| receive it back. This means that any benefits of the
| collaboration tools (eg. review history or suggesting
| changes) are wiped off the table. I will have to
| integrate any suggested changes into my own authoritative
| version of the document by hand anyways. At that point I
| may as well work where _I_ fell comfortable and use
| markdown / latex, and send off Pandoc converted word
| files for comments by others when it is relevant.
|
| This is of course for serious pieces of writing, not
| throwaway stuff like eg. meeting notes, but for those
| Google docs is plenty.
| friendzis wrote:
| IMO entirely user.
|
| Word (and similar text processors) is a toolset. All it
| gives you are tools. Word lets you define formatting
| rulesets, lets you apply formatting rules and create
| rulesets from applied rules.
|
| Some evangelists may say that "safe" text processor would
| only allow application of rulesets, because direct
| application of rules leads to "spaghetti formatting".
| However that is one of the powers of WYSIWYG text
| processors: you apply the rules and extract those to
| rulesets once you are satisfied with results, in an
| explorative way. Direct application of rules is a feature
| that makes Word what it is.
|
| Now, if a user takes a document with predefined rulesets
| and still applies their own rules inconsistently that's
| simply misuse of the tool.
| themadturk wrote:
| But what of the potential lack of a compatible toolset on
| the other end of this pipeline? Even embedding styles in
| a Word document offers no assurance the document will
| appear as you intend when they receive it, much less if
| they offer edits and comments and send it back.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| Is there a way to lock documents in some way, so that
| direct formatting is disallowed and only styles work? Not
| that we could truly lock a document, but at least having
| some sort of header that lists allowed features, such
| that one would get a warning whenever they veered off
| course?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Don't think such fine grained control exists. There is
| read only mode[1], which (I assume) limits the reader to
| only comment.
|
| [1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/make-a-
| document-r...
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| Good point, sigh...this is so true. I have created a 45
| minute tutorial of 'how to use word properly' to address
| this exact pain point. I send a link to my students if
| their first draft commits any 'sins'.
|
| BTW, when I said tech people, I was thinking mostly about
| the computer savvy academics who use Latex for
| everything.
| weebull wrote:
| People use things like LaTeX exactly because of this
| problem. Word processing software brought the problem of
| inconsistent formatting and layout within the grasp of
| everyone and boy! ...did they grab it with both hands.
| Systems based on plain text allow the author to
| concentrate on content only, without the need to format.
|
| Personally I find LaTeX misses the mark. Too much markup
| is needed and it detracts. I'm a fan of asciidoc though.
| I just wish the templating was a little better though.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| TeX documents have a distinctive look because of their
| typography. Back when printed resumes were a thing,
| whenever I saw one done in TeX, I would recognize the CM
| font right away. I'd then look at the resume early, since
| I knew that it came from a nerd. Mine was of course also
| done that way.
| jll29 wrote:
| It's ideal for hiring - you immediately know which
| resumes to read and which one to dump into the trash.
| riwsky wrote:
| Unless you're looking for Haskell nerds, in which case
| you should prioritize Comic Sans.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| There is also Coq's documentation system, which has its
| own distinctive look:
|
| https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/lf-
| current/Basics....
| Quekid5 wrote:
| Simon PJ glares :)
|
| For those not in the know, Simon Peyton Jones is one of
| the originators of Haskell, and sort-of-but-not-quite
| BDFL of Haskell... and he uses Comic Sans for all his
| presentations because it filters out people who will
| complain about font choice for a presentation.
| sam_bristow wrote:
| My personal sweet-spot for writing technical documents
| these days is Asciidoctor with semantic line breaks [1].
| There are some warts in the asciidoc syntax but it covers
| a lot more of the features I need for the types of
| documents I'm writing compared to Markdown.
|
| [1] https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-
| line/
| enriquto wrote:
| > It is the equivalent of seeing somebody use right-click
| to copy-paste
|
| What would you prefer, instead? CTRL-C, CTRL-V? SHIFT-
| INS, CTRL-INS? some vim incantation?
|
| As a select-to-copy/middle-click-to-paste guy, seeing
| people use these inferior alternatives looks extremely
| annoying to me.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| I think that depends if your workflow is oriented around
| the keyboard or the mouse. For me it is keyboard oriented
| and I frequently use (Ctrl)+Shift+Arrows for finegrained
| selection anyways so Ctrl+C/V is most convenient. I also
| use Vimium in my browser. If my workflow was mouse
| oriented I'd instead use Gesturefy.
|
| I think they're equivalent and certainly both are better
| than using the right-click menu.
| enriquto wrote:
| I don't always use the mouse, but when I do, I _only_ use
| the mouse, no keyboard needed at all.
|
| Using CTRL+C/V requires an unholy synchronization of
| mouse and keyboard. But unix-style middle-click paste is
| entirely mouse-controlled and very elegant. Of course, if
| you are inside a text file, you can use vim keyboard
| tricks that are even faster because you don't need to
| select the text.
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| _> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means
| you don't know how to use Word properly"._
|
| Or maybe those people just have eyes which can spot the
| differences in spacing between documents created with
| different Word versions, the mediocre kerning, and a
| multitude of other typographical annoyances.
|
| Even a website is easier to replicate exactly in another
| browser than a Word document to be replicated from scratch
| in a new version of Word. And if by some miracle you manage
| that, the end result will always look meh.
| queuebert wrote:
| Yes, anyone who's ever learned LaTeX and why it was
| invented immediately sees how absolutely awful Word is at
| its rendering. Funny that a trillion-dollar company can't
| seem to figure out a better algorithm than Donald Knuth
| mocked up in Pascal decades ago.
|
| I think of this as another version of enshittification --
| the acceptance of poor performance as the "standard".
|
| And don't get me started on math equations in Word ...
| jll29 wrote:
| > To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means
| you don't know how to use Word properly".
|
| I used to teach how to write serial letters with Word to
| secretaries when I was in high school. I used to write
| VBA macros that call in and out SAP systems when I was a
| junior software engineer - because "I was young and I
| needed the money."(tm)
|
| Now I either write in Emacs or Sublime on a Linux box
| with 2 TB RAM, or in Overleaf (LaTeX collab Web
| application), and I say: "Word sucks", I shall be
| suffering no more.
|
| Word does not exist in my operating system (except for
| QEMU), and nobody notices.
|
| LaTeX creates beautifully typeset publications, and most
| day to day writing requires nothing more than plain text,
| which is the most durable format.
| thworp wrote:
| For me personally it's the reverse. After 15 years of
| writing almost exclusively with vim (or vim-like) input
| scheme using anything else would really break my flow. Can
| you even do something like ct, (delete everything between
| current cursor and next comma, then start insert mode) in
| word? Even if you could, it would be some 5-key monstrosity
| which makes you move from home row.
|
| Now granted, if you're just hammering out words without any
| editing this doesn't matter, but I think almost every piece
| of good writing has had 3+ revisions.
|
| Of course this is a personal preference, but my friends who
| do a lot of writing (and never used vim at all) still seem
| to prefer a distraction-free editor with a lot less
| features and a much less noisy UI for the actual writing.
| Ringz wrote:
| He doesn't understand ct, nor can he grok the beauty of
| vim and all the muscle memory that doesn't interrupt the
| (writing) flow. Since he learned to scroll with the mouse
| and click at a position to change something every problem
| is a nail.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| I agree with your premise of "don't be distracted" when
| writing, but for me Word often is the distraction. I use a
| live-preview markdown editor (e.g., Typora, MarkText) to
| let me get my thoughts onto paper (screen) with low
| friction. It's easier to just hit "#" rather than drag the
| mouse to the style bar and select heading. Or more
| importantly for me, it's so much easier to hit "$" and
| seamlessly go into LaTeX for math than it is to open the
| equation editor and start selecting all the template
| objects.
|
| When it's time to collaborate, I use Pandoc to turn it into
| docx and then I send it around and the final formatting
| happens in Word because that's the easiest for everyone to
| work with, but the "get the ideas down" phase works best
| for me in a more "minimal" editor with little formatting.
|
| I love the idea of Quarto, and if I had that when I was in
| grad school, it would have made my life so much easier. The
| workflow I see for Quarto is that you can write your paper
| while you're doing the experimentation because the code is
| embedded with your thoughts. But in that case, you're
| mostly slowed down by the research process so it can be a
| little more clunky to get the writing done because you have
| time and you're iterating over ideas more than words in
| that phase. I'd use it now for work in the R&D phase, but I
| know I won't have a critical mass of collaborators to make
| it worth while.
| tombert wrote:
| Part of the reason I stopped using Word was that I
| absolutely abhorred 2007-and-beyond's equation editor. I
| was using previous versions of Word with Mathtype for my
| math homework, but I found the new equation editor really
| hard to use. Around the same time I had coincidentally to
| Linux, and OpenOffice has an even worse equation editor.
|
| Pandoc was a game changer for me. I picked up LaTeX
| equation editor pretty quick, and being able to write
| markdown was so much more pleasant in my mind.
|
| It's not perfect; tables are a pain still, but I have no
| desire to go back to Word.
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| You are probably the only person I've heard that liked
| the old mathtype editor :-) The new editor is terrific
| because you can use just type the equation in latex
| format (e.g. A_c = \pi R^2 ). Then you hit the space bar
| and it converts to wysiwyg style. Most of my equations
| are on the simpler side I guess.
| tombert wrote:
| I didn't know about being able to type the LaTeX stuff;
| that's pretty neat.
|
| I think part of it was that I had basically memorized all
| the keystrokes for the MathType editor, and most of them
| didn't work in the MS Equation editor, which annoyed me.
| Also, I had issues with parentheses formatting correctly
| but I suspect that's been fixed in the last 15 years.
|
| Still, I really do prefer to work with Markdown in
| general. The Markdown -> Pandoc -> LaTeX rendering just
| ends up looking prettier in my opinion, and at this point
| I'm pretty useless in any editor that doesn't have Vim
| keystrokes. Pandoc irons out the parts of LaTeX that I
| really hate (the `` vs " being the thing that's given me
| the most headaches), while letting me drop into raw LaTeX
| when I need it; not even getting into the fact that
| there's just math stuff that (as far as I know) doesn't
| work in Word or MathType's equation editor (e.g.
| bussproof trees).
|
| I do get pretty annoyed when people try and tell me that
| regular LaTeX is "just as easy" as Word, because even as
| someone who has a reasonably good handle on LaTeX I can
| say that is just not true. TeX is arcane and weird and
| annoying and inconsistent, and I don't blame people for
| using Word compared to it.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact
| that writing should happen in "word processing software",
| and Word is the best-in-class.
|
| It depends on the person. The best way for me to write is
| on paper, on a desk with lots of empty space, with paper
| versions of all reference material.
| stakhanov wrote:
| > slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing
|
| It's a bit of a matter of perspective.
|
| The distinction between looking at a document in markdown
| versus Word is a bit analogous to the distinction between
| looking at a movie in its textual form as a screenplay
| versus looking at a movie as a piece of video: Text is
| capable of _abstraction_ in a way that video is not.
|
| In the screenplay, it might say "table", but when the
| director translates it to video, the director will have to
| decide: What kind of table? What design? What period? What
| texture? Is there anything on the table?
|
| None of these decisions matter to the construction of the
| story, so, for a screenwriter, it would be very distracting
| if they had to make all of those decisions just to be able
| to get "table" committed to the medium.
|
| In Markdown you worry about text and nothing but text. But
| Word shoves a _particular_ font in your face as soon as you
| 're laying down the first letter, so, if you don't like
| Word's choice of fonts, you can either let it annoy you
| throughout the project, or you can start worrying about
| fonts right then and there, which will be a distraction. If
| you write Markdown in a code editor, then, presumably,
| you've already set up the code editor in a way that doesn't
| annoy you. And then your future self (or someone else
| entirely) can worry about the font.
| mattl wrote:
| We collaboratively write screenplays in markdown
| (actually fountain but its markdown plus some
| screenwriting stuff) and save them into Dropbox.
|
| pandoc and some other tools turn those scenes into a full
| screenplay.
| chaxor wrote:
| It's worth noting here (even though I also use
| vim/markdown/typst, and Word is a thing of the past) that
| markdown _does_ say something more than "just the text".
|
| It puts the header notation and style (like italic, etc)
| in-line. So does Typst or LaTeX, and I can't think of any
| typical stand-off examples for headers and such, but it
| does muddy the text in-line in that sense. It typically
| doesn't really slow down the writing, but if you're
| writing \\# as comments for code, then don't have those
| wrapped in \\`\\`\\`, you can get some problems.
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| I know you're just font as an example, but doesn't your
| markdown editor also shove a font in your face? You can
| adjust default behavior in Word just as well as in
| another editor.
|
| Anyway, to work within your analogy, I would say that
| Word lets the write do a bit of a 'mockup' of the set
| with nearly 0 effort. Like "I want a table here", so 2-3
| clicks and you have it. Then you can "let the director"
| take your mock up and flesh it out properly later. As a
| writing, it helps me to see the mock up of the product as
| a go, but I want that mock up to be effortless. And as I
| said above, I do some work up front to make sure that
| Word's mock up looks good (or good enough).
| weebull wrote:
| ...and that's the problem. You can easily get distracted
| by the look of the words on the page. Is the heading big
| enough, centered, got enough white space around it. By
| the time you've faffed about with that, I'm onto my
| second or third paragraph of content.
| themadturk wrote:
| Obviously everything that puts text on a screen puts a
| font in the user's face. But Word also presents you with
| _styles_ , which make what you see changeable from the
| whitespace on up. Not only can one paragraph look
| different than the next, one word in a paragraph can look
| different from the word following it.
|
| It's true that many document elements, such as tables,
| are easy to create in Word. This puts it over the edge
| into desktop publishing territory. In itself, that's not
| especially a bad thing, especially if your target is a
| printed file or a PDF. That still makes it a publishing
| tool, not especially a writing tool.
| guyomes wrote:
| > My most favoritest feature so far is that it converts
| tables AND equations to markdown and latex perfectly.
|
| You might be interested in Texmacs [1]. It is has a wysiwyg
| interface, and it handles nicely tables and mathematical
| equations. Also you can export documents to the latex
| format.
|
| [1]: https://www.texmacs.org
| azangru wrote:
| > People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact
| that writing should happen in "word processing software"
|
| The fact? Should? In "word processing software"? Why
| shouldn't it happen in "text editing software"? Writing
| produces text, after all.
| temporarara wrote:
| This. Text editors automatically give you that exact Jack
| Kerouac "rolls of paper" experience. It's just text.
| Formatting comes later, word or tex or some other system
| you like.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Rant ahead:
|
| So, as it must be me not knowing, can you tell me why Word
| won't let me change table column size ~50% of the time (for
| the same table from the same source). Half the time autofit
| works (yay!), half the time it won't let me resize columns,
| neither by typing the number, nor dragging the invisible
| off-page divider (Microsoft should just make the
| transparency of off-page content 50%??), nor changing to
| draft view and dragging the actual dividers ... wtf is
| going on there? If I paste it into OneNote first then it
| fits ... sometimes, if I drag a column wider first (which
| it already rendered 5x the width OneNote did) then it will
| let me narrow it afterwards, what's that feature called
| AutoNoNarrowColumnRenderedIncorrectlyFiveTimes
| ExpectedWidth?? I'll just search the settings to turn that
| off ... oh wait!
|
| These are the times I long for markdown, or 'reveal codes'
| ... MS Word has a lot of problems they could probably have
| fixed if they hadn't put so much effort into preventing
| interoperability. These sorts of issues were around 20
| years ago when I stopped using Word, and 5 years ago when I
| restarted. Same asinine poorly implemented numbering and
| styles that are unintuitive, opaque, and ungainly ... and
| don't get me started on search! Multi-highlights? Sorry
| best I can do is "find next" with no find previous, no
| regex, ... you can do find in AutoText though, right,
| right? ... and all the AutoText and AutoCorrect gets saved
| in a single sensible format that's easily modified? ...
| Word changes the format of all windows when you open a new
| one too, just in case you thought the suck was restricted
| to within the window chrome ... and doesn't have always-on-
| top, and doesn't open windows in their last position, and
| ...
|
| Doesn't suck ...???!
|
| Whilst you're here, any ideas why OneNote eliminates
| footnotes so you can't cut-paste between Word and OneNote?
| I'm sure it's not flawed and I'm just holding it wrong,
| right ...?
| chaxor wrote:
| There are other reasons to not like Word other than 'it
| six's. One is availability. If you're on Linux all day,
| your options don't really contain word - it's not free to
| download and install due to needing a license. You have to
| go and _find_ some other computer that runs windows, and
| start it up - just for that one document. Then you have a
| single use computer, which obviously isn 't a great
| experience. Closest thing that I use is Google docs,
| sometimes. I (and many others like me) know how to use word
| (and excel) pretty well due to some life in that world. I
| still remember most of many of the hotkey combinations to
| step through the menus. The reason I use vim for everything
| now is - I use vim for everything. I live in
| vim/tmux/ssh/tui, so most problems go there first if they
| can. There are obvious benefits to the vim/git/Typst setup,
| if plots need to go in a document for example, but it's
| also strengthened by word not being easily available.
| criddell wrote:
| There is a free web version of Word that is pretty good.
| ashton314 wrote:
| You lost me at "web". Local-first is so much nicer for my
| workflow--and I am sure this holds for most other people.
| criddell wrote:
| The person I responded to uses Google Docs.
| chaxor wrote:
| You mean OpenOffice? Because it's not quite the same
| thing. It can cause some differences in appearance for
| docx (though that doesn't mean much, since M$FT Word also
| doesn't display their own doc format consistently
| either).
| criddell wrote:
| No, OpenOffice is the Apache project that shares ancestry
| with LibreOffice.
|
| I'm talking about the Microsoft product that is now sold
| under the _Microsoft 365 Online_ brand.
|
| It isn't a perfect replacement but for the times I've
| used it, it's been pretty good.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| If you want to use Word, then that's great, but when you
| start saying what other people 'should' be doing then
| they're going to speak up.
|
| > writing should happen in "word processing software"
|
| Writing should happen where you are comfortable editing
| text. I am comfortable in same editor where I write code.
|
| > To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you
| don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or
| markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative
| process.
|
| To all the people who say "Writing markup in an IDE sux", I
| say "That just means you don't know how to use it
| properly". I can write in a flow and apply/change
| formatting easily. I can jump around and rearrange
| documents with ease. And it is in a format that can be
| opened and read by native software on almost any computer.
|
| If you think that Jack Kerouac would prefer MS Word over a
| much simpler plain text editor, I don't agree.
| bostik wrote:
| > _Writing should happen where you are comfortable
| editing text._
|
| For that particular context of text.
|
| I write my code, notes, text and emails in vim. Some in
| markdown. But to this day, I still miss the incredible
| usability of LyX 1.x when writing pure long-form
| text.[ss] I could force all writing to occur within
| central 60% of the _editable_ screen height [doable with
| vim but not as cleanly]. No whitespace or formatting
| issues, ever - set the document defaults according to my
| liking and it would feel "just right".
|
| Proper rendering and visually correct editing of math
| formulas as part of text. Oh my. Fond memories of being
| able to type '<raw latex hotkey>\frac' and continue
| fitting in the values...
|
| If it had had vim's search-powered navigation, it would
| have been nearly perfect. LyX 2.x was a step up in visual
| appeal and two steps down in raw usability. I've since
| picked up writing raw latex where I need good formatting,
| just because I could not make LyX 2.x bend to my taste
| anymore.
|
| ss: Back on early 2000's, I wrote a book in LyX. As well
| as all my university course papers, including the
| master's thesis.
| WolfOliver wrote:
| > Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a
| disaster for the creative process.
|
| I would like to quote this on a MonsterWriter landing page
| kelnos wrote:
| You're kinda contradicting yourself there.
|
| Kerouac used a typewriter, which is about as minimal as it
| gets before you drop down to pen and paper. Something like
| Word is full of distractions: fonts, section headings,
| various formatting options, etc.
|
| If you really want to get into the flow of writing, do it
| like Kerouac: plain text editor that wraps words at
| whatever width is reasonable to you.
|
| After you're done, _then_ copy it into a word processor and
| apply your formatting rules. Or just stick with the plain
| text editor and use anything from markdown to tex.
|
| Ultimately, though, use what you're most comfortable with!
| That's going to be different, sometimes, for different
| people. The idea that it's a "fact" that everyone should be
| writing in any particular way using any particular software
| is just nonsense.
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| I tend to agree that most users don't know how to use Word
| well. I think this is true of IDEs as well. Most users,
| even technically savvy ones, use a small subset of features
| and disregard the lesser-used aspects. And then are later
| surprised when they see someone use a feature that they
| didn't know existed because it was outside the ambit of
| their immediate knowledge.
|
| However, I'm not sure that even with greater knowledge of
| Word's features, whether developers in general would come
| to like it.
| cosmojg wrote:
| 1. Write prose in plaintext using preferred text editor
|
| 2. Add formatting using preferred markup language
|
| 3. ???
|
| 4. Profit!
|
| Seriously, though, writing prose in a simple text editor
| and worrying about formatting later is far less distracting
| than writing prose in a WYSIWYG word processor. Also,
| adding formatting using a markup language ends up looking
| far nicer far faster than using a WYSIWYG word processor.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Word is the _worst_ very popular program for the inverse
| reason of why Excel is the best; the extent to which a
| regular user can easily determine and or modify "why
| something they see on the screen appears the way it does."
|
| In Excel, you click on the cell and see either e.g. the
| number or formula used to get the result you see.
|
| In Word, well, it's just difficult to figure out exactly
| why a thing looks the way it does.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Excel's conditional formatting is pretty damn difficult
| to inspect, IMO.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Not a flamewar, honest question from someone that couldn't
| stand Word last time I used it (far over a decade ago) but
| actually likes Open Office (well, LibreOffice, but I still
| call it Open Office). I'll grant that the Excel equivalent
| is nowhere near feature competitive with Excel, but the
| Word equivalent is, in my opinion, better.
|
| Have you tried Libre Office? I'd love to hear your opinion.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact
| that writing should happen in "word processing software"
|
| Uh, that's just like, your opinion, man.
| themadturk wrote:
| If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of
| paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word.
| Word divides the document into discrete pages, while
| WordStar documents were long uninterrupted ribbons of text,
| just like Kerouac's rolls. Perhaps Kerouac "got it," but so
| do George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer, writers who
| continue to use WordStar decades after its demise (Sawyer
| even talks about the benefits of this undivided waterfall
| of text on his website [0]. Text editors also similarly
| long ribbons of text, and are just as conducive to putting
| words down as any bloated word processor that is optimized
| to produce two page corporate memos or colorful party
| posters to be posted in the lunch room.
|
| I've used Word professionally since the mid-1990s. I _do_
| know how to use it properly, and it still sucks.
|
| "Writing" isn't meant to be done in a word processor, which
| was developed as a business tool, not a creative tool.
| Writing should be done in whatever tool one wants to write
| in.
|
| Word is, be design, both a desktop publishing app and a
| secretarial tool. For book-length writing, it works poorly
| with long files, the file format is subject to corruption.
| The docx format is also proprietary and subject to
| Microsoft's whim; any conversion scheme is a hack (though
| Pandoc and many others _do_ work adequately). Unless you
| learn the ins and outs of Word 's style scheme (and
| sometimes even if you do) and follow it slavishly,
| formatting is often inconsistent and there's no certainty
| that the styles you apply to make your document to make it
| look a certain way ensure it looks that way on someone
| else's machine.
|
| There's no doubt, though, that a Word-compatible word
| processor needs to be in every writers' toolkit, since it
| is the standard in the publishing world.
|
| [0] https://www.sfwriter.com/wordstar.htm, scroll down or
| search for THE LONG-HAND PAGE METAPHOR.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| You might find it interesting that I never read any docx sent
| to me and instead run it through pandoc to convert it to
| markdown first.
| __fst__ wrote:
| Process over Tools.
| agumonkey wrote:
| you managed to find a lean way to go docx to pdf using pandoc
| ? last time i tried it required a whole latex stack behind
| it.
| lhamil64 wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why use Pandoc? Can't Word natively save as
| HTML, PDF, etc?
| weinzierl wrote:
| It is one of the most useful programs I use and the only useful
| program I ever used that was written in Haskell.
| whateveracct wrote:
| > only useful program I ever used that was written in Haskell
|
| Never used Shellcheck?
| kugurerdem wrote:
| Whoa, I use Shellcheck a lot and did not even know it was
| written in Haskell.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| xmonad team checking in.
| matijash wrote:
| Wasp team reporting to duty: https://github.com/wasp-
| lang/wasp
| ggregoire wrote:
| Don't know if you would call this a "program" but PostgREST
| is written is Haskell too.
|
| https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest
| kps wrote:
| I probably use it every day, without noticing, to view markdown
| docs in a terminal, via a `.lessfilter` invoking [my fork of]
| https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/pandoc-terminal-writer
|
| I also very much like Pandoc-markdown's 'simple table' syntax,
| because it's actually human-readable and human-writable without
| confusion and pain.
| leephillips wrote:
| Quite a coincidence: I also stopped hard-wrapping my emails
| after reading that same essay, and I also use Pandoc to prepare
| my emails (or a program, invoked by a shortcut in vim, that
| sends the selected text to Pandoc).
| kugurerdem wrote:
| A very interesting coincidence indeed. Nice to see that
| others have also thought about the same problem and have
| found solutions similar to mine. :)
| nemoniac wrote:
| While pandoc is certainly a very useful tool, don't you think
| it's overkill to call a 143MB (on my Linux system) pandoc
| executable to do word (un)wrapping?
|
| Emacs has `fill-paragraph` built in and `unfill-paragraph` is a
| short function definition [1]. Both work across multiple
| paragraphs.
|
| [1] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/UnfillParagraph
| kugurerdem wrote:
| Nice point! I agree that it's a bloated method, however, this
| was the best solution I could come up with at that point of
| time. I am certain that there are better solutions, it's just
| me who could not find it. I went with this solution anyways
| since it was still an improvement compared to my previous
| method in vim which involved setting the text width to a
| large number like 9999, highlighting the text I wanted to
| unwrap and then typing 'gqq' for formatting, and then yanking
| it. And of course, I had to re-wrap the text if I wanted to
| maintain the original format of the text file.
|
| You are absolutely right and I understand what you mean
| though. I am open to trying other alternatives and I should
| try to come up with a better method to workaround this
| problem.
|
| Never tried Emacs, just went with Vim so far. Did not know
| that Emacs had already an elegant solution for this problem.
| Nice! :)
| pxeger1 wrote:
| My solution would be to go to the start of each paragraph
| and hold J (shift + j) until the entire paragraph was
| joined onto one line, and then go down to the next one. I
| guess it depends on how long your emails are but this is
| pretty quick.
| eichin wrote:
| I haven't needed it myself, but it might be easier to
| just keep the document in line-break-per-paragraph form
| and just turn on visual-line-mode...
| kugurerdem wrote:
| My problem with this method is that it's not convenient
| especially when there are lots of paragraphs. When you
| highlight all the paragraphs and press shift J, it
| unwraps everything into a single line. This results
| different paragraphs ending up on the same line. You also
| need to undo the changes you made to avoid disturbing the
| original file content.
| aktenlage wrote:
| "vapJ" might do the trick for one paragraph. So maybe you
| can make a mapping that does vapJ and moving to the next
| paragraph ("]]"?) in your vimrc will let you do this with
| a count.
| flexagoon wrote:
| qfvapJ]]q
|
| to record a macro that joins a single paragraph together
|
| <N>@f
|
| to then replay that macro <N> times
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| I have almost never thought about the file size of a program
| (even for big games) on a daily use machine.
|
| I am certainly not gonna be learning and switching to emac
| just to perform this task for unwrapping a .docx file
| brrsty wrote:
| In Vim, J on a selected paragraph does this job.
| tropianhs wrote:
| I thought writing code in vim was debatable, but emails...you
| went to far for me.
| flexagoon wrote:
| Why? I don't use (Neo)Vim the editor specifically for
| anything except code, but I do use Vim bindings pretty much
| everywhere where I have to write text, because it's much more
| convenient. If I wanted to write an email and my email client
| didn't support vim keys, it would make sense to just write
| the email in vim and copy it to the mail client.
| spinningslate wrote:
| Pandoc is one of my favourite all time tools. As the website
| says:
|
| > If you need to convert files from one markup format into
| another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife
|
| It also sits at the heart of Quarto[0], which adds Jupyter-like
| code execution (in R, Python and others) into document
| production. Combined with RStudio as an IDE, it's my new
| favourite way to write anything - from static documents to full
| on code notebooks.
|
| No affiliation with Posit, the company behind Quarto & RStudio.
| Just a happy user.
|
| --
|
| [0]: https://quarto.org/
|
| [1]: https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio/
| banga wrote:
| Codebraid[0] is another option for integrating code execution
| with Pandoc. I find myself using Quarto for building sites and
| Codebraid more for single documents. Both great tools building
| on Pandoc.
|
| --
|
| [0]: https://codebraid.org/
| nerdponx wrote:
| Why do all these tools pretend that knitr / R Markdown never
| existed, and that they have invented some novel concept? I
| looked through the docs of Quarto, Jupytext, and now
| Codebraid, and none of them mention prior art.
|
| There's a long legacy here, it does nobody any good to
| disregard it. Maybe Knuth is well-acknowledged for his
| invention, but I think for instance Yihui Xie is a little
| under-recognized.
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| From what I can tell, Quarto is essentially an installer
| for Knitr/R, that also comes with a bunch of goodies, like
| when working in VSC (or Rstudio) it auto-suggests cross-
| references to content in the document, like
| figures/chapters/equations/etc. It also has a github action
| that builds and deploys the site in like 1 one line. Just
| removing the friction and lowering the bar is very helpful
| sometimes.
| hadley wrote:
| Is there some way we could advertise this better? The
| quarto homepage already says "Quarto is a multi-language,
| next generation version of R Markdown from Posit, with many
| new new features and capabilities."
|
| When talking about Quarto within the R community we usually
| frame it this way, but obviously it's not a very useful
| description if you've never heard of RMarkdown.
| nerdponx wrote:
| If that's how you frame it, then I stand corrected and I
| apologize for my incorrect criticism.
| pmags wrote:
| And knitr is built on the prior art foundations of
| Sweave....
| hadley wrote:
| And sweave is built on noweb :)
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Quarto is amazing for creating reports and programmatic slide
| decks!
| snet0 wrote:
| I wrote pretty much all my university work in Markdown with
| inline Latex, using Pandoc to generate a pdf. I'm sure there are
| things you can do in "pure" latex that you can't do this way, but
| for most normal cases, it's so much easier. You just use the
| simple Markdown syntax for basic text formatting, and then can
| use the power of Latex when you need to display mathematics,
| graphs, tables or similar.
| khofstadter wrote:
| Me too :-) It was a steep learning curve but worth it. I used
| it 'within' VSC.
| airstrike wrote:
| I'm doing that too... did you render against a template file in
| the end?
|
| I also went ahead and set up my root "notes" folder to be
| served with mkdocs so I can easily browse them, and just render
| a PDF when I must submit some file to a third party
| snet0 wrote:
| I used a vim template plugin (I believe called vim-templates,
| believe it or not) to get some YAML and formatting
| boilerplate, and then I think I rendered against the default
| templates. I do remember having to adjust the defaults for
| some reports, though.
| ngruhn wrote:
| damn, I'll try that
| dillydogg wrote:
| I do the same thing, except using org mode instead of markdown.
| I've really come to love org mode for writing.
| macintux wrote:
| Worth noting that the author has also created a markup language,
| djot.
|
| https://github.com/jgm/djot
| dfc wrote:
| Prof. MacFarlane is also one of the commonmark maintainers.
| malloc-0x90 wrote:
| I tried to use it to make an invoice system: wanted to convert
| plain-text CSV (description,amount,cost) --> to Markdown tables
| --> to PDF.
|
| But I was unable to align the following 2nd table with taxes:
| cells are all over the place and it does whatever it wants. And
| there is no information online to be found about it.
|
| (I eventually gave up long time ago and still to this day
| manually do them in LibreOffice Writer adding taxes with a
| calculator)
|
| Except this, it's a really neat piece of FOSS software!
| jddj wrote:
| Maybe you could use html as an intermediate point instead of
| markdown. Might give you more control over the layout.
|
| Might have to use a headless chromium wrapper (maybe pandoc has
| this anyway) to then get to pdf but that may not be too bad
| stakhanov wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing: I would use HTML as an
| intermediate, targeting PDF through weasyprint.
|
| In fact I quite often go .md -> .html with pandoc, but write
| the .md in such a way that, when translated, it is the kind
| of html that weasyprint will be able to turn into the PDF
| that I want.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I just recently put together something for invoices that wound
| up being Jinja2 + data -> HTML-> weasyprint -> pdf. Was quite
| straight forward, all in all.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I use pandoc quite often - but I wish the intermediate,
| internal pandoc format was a little more expressive, exactly
| for things like this. I also tried making an invoice.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| I tried something like that but ended up going with markdown ->
| html -> puppeteer to generate an A4 pdf -> ghostscript to
| compress it.
|
| It's an ugly script that's been working quite well for more
| than a decade, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone other than
| myself.
| deciduously wrote:
| I have a very similar homegrown mess. I wonder how many of us
| there are doing the same thing for this use case.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| By looking at this thread, quite a few. The problem is
| creating a solution that would fit all of our
| idiosyncrasies.
|
| For example, in my code, if a table has the class "total"
| it sums all <td>s which contains a dollar sign, and so on.
| Karellen wrote:
| Have you looked at hledger, which generates everything from
| plain-text accounts files?
|
| https://hledger.org/
|
| https://hledger.org/invoicing.html
|
| https://plaintextaccounting.org/
|
| One previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012499
| sureglymop wrote:
| Has anyone had success with running pandoc in a browser/compiling
| it to webassembly?
|
| I haven't had time to look into it a lot but I think that would
| be amazing.
| tionis wrote:
| Well there's this: https://github.com/y-taka-23/wasm-pandoc I
| tried it some time ago and it worked quite well
| furiousteabag wrote:
| I really like using pandoc as a build system [1] for my personal
| website to convert .md to .html. I can use templates,
| automatically generate a table of content and run some lua
| scripts to get the desired result, such as clickable headers.
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/furiousteabag/asmirnov.xyz/blob/master/bu...
| ilovefood wrote:
| I love Pandoc!
|
| I recently learned you can use LUA to write custom plugins and
| change some of the converting behavior. I'm using it for example
| to create slides similar to the "sent" program.
|
| It helps me bootstrap new presentations and talks very quickly:
| https://github.com/KarimJedda/justslides
| megamix wrote:
| Yes, I know.
| on_the_train wrote:
| Every couple of years I need pandoc for some project. And teach
| time I relearn the same idiosyncrasies. Some odd defaults, the
| sometimes annoying depths you have to do to customize HTML
| templates, the weird filter infrastructure. What a neat strange
| program it is.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I have this same issue, and the same with `jq` and `GNU
| Parallel`.
|
| When you need them you need them, and nothing else quite works,
| but I have to re-learn them every time.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Set a huge number for your shell history and dedup. You'll
| effectively save every command you ever typed in
| chronological order. You can even append comments to the end
| of the command for your future self.
|
| Then, fzf your history.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I do, and use fzf, and that helps, but with most tools I'm
| a bit OCD about understanding what I'm doing.
|
| I also use Anki SRS flashcards and put a lot of tool usage
| exemplars in there; it not only helps me remember a bit of
| what I need to do, but if nothing else I remember THAT I
| put it there so I can use that to go look it up again. And
| this is coming from someone who grew up with and is
| comfortable with `--help` screens and man pages.
| on_the_train wrote:
| Which is actually quite a strong point for guis, amidst all
| their problems
| meonkeys wrote:
| Agreed, surely if there's one button in a GUI that will
| just do the thing you need (say, spitting out a PDF version
| of the document you're editing) but you'd otherwise need to
| recall multiple command-line programs, options, and/or
| arguments.
|
| However, often I'll open up a GUI I haven't used in a while
| and feel like I'm just as lost as I am with a command-line
| tool I haven't used in a while. I rely on notes I've taken
| and try to stick with stable software.
| jbranchaud wrote:
| I outsource most of my esoteric `jq` syntax questions to
| ChatGPT. It does really well with them, usually turning up
| solutions that I'd struggle to munge together from several
| different google search results.
|
| I wonder how ChatGPT would do with focussed pandoc requests.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I'm not allowed to use chatgippity at work, sadly. But Ive
| heard a lot of people mention this so I might try it at
| home and see what's what.
| meonkeys wrote:
| Same here! Haha.
|
| Can you think of any command-line tool you might not use for
| 6 or 12mo but when you crack it open after a long time it
| _is_ intuitive how to do what you need to?
|
| I hypothesize muscle memory is required for efficiency at the
| command line.
| xinayder wrote:
| The only issue I have with pandoc is the dependency hell it
| requires. It requires a lot of haskell dependencies and just eats
| up your storage space.
| Athas wrote:
| The pandoc binary I have is certainly large at 206MiB (more
| than I expected!), but it doesn't have any weird dependencies I
| can see. Just GMP, ncurses, and such. All the Haskell parts are
| statically linked, which is probably the reason it is so large.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Arch Linux is linking dynamically, IIRC, and there it is
| 'only' 64 MiB:
| https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/haskell-pandoc/
| algas wrote:
| It also pulls in about a hundred separate Haskell libraries
| along with it. Not really complaining, but it's funny that
| pandoc accounts for about half the programs on my laptop.
| dagoodboy wrote:
| I use pandoc with some Make scripts to generate the epub of my
| novels and short stories. Having a reproducible way to iterate
| from source to final docs during edits and correction passes is
| amazing. I can't imagine doing it any other way.
| asicsp wrote:
| I use it to generate PDF/EPUB versions from GitHub style markdown
| for my ebooks. The default output was good enough, but I wanted
| to customize a few things [0]. I didn't know LaTeX, but I was
| able to use solutions from stackoverflow sites. Later I found
| that some users had created templates I could've borrowed.
|
| I use mdBook [1] for web versions though. I found the default
| setup much easier to use. And it came with themes
| (light/dark/etc) that readers can choose.
|
| [0] https://learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/
|
| [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook
| bradley_taunt wrote:
| Huge fan of Pandoc. I don't use it for my personal website
| anymore, but I created a very crude "site generator" that
| piggybacks off Pandoc called pblog[0].
|
| [0]: https://pblog.btxx.org/
| happyjack wrote:
| Pandoc saved my ass so many times when I worked in research. I
| would write a beautiful typeset paper in latex and then have to
| send a colleague a word doc.
|
| You can turn any file into anything. PDF to rtf, latex to .doc,
| etc. It does a great job. Written in Haskell, too!
| ktzar wrote:
| This is what I used to typeset my novel. My editor and publisher
| tried multiple methods and they kept being impressed by how clean
| and "just right" the versions I sent them were... In the end, we
| ended up using the PDFs generated by Pandoc instead of InDesign
| or whatever proprietary stuff they used.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Pandora is awesome. Add a self published author, this is a key
| tool in my tickets to have a single source of truth and
| (relatively) easily create beautiful PDFs and EPUBs.
|
| I previously used restructured text and had to write custom
| tooling, but now I can write markdown on Jupyter.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| And by "Pandora" .... I mean pandoc, and that I hate typing on
| my phone
| mapreduce wrote:
| A question to experienced Pandoc users:
|
| I want to write a small book that I want to generate in 3
| formats: HTML pages, EPUB and PDF. What is the best input format
| (source format) for the book? Pandoc Markdown? CommonMark? GFM?
|
| I'm a little hesitant to committing myself to Pandoc Markdown or
| any Markdown because they all have tiny differences with each
| other. Each is like its own standard.
|
| I considered Org-mode for some time but there are so many edge
| cases in which Pandoc does not parse Org-mode properly. I mean
| sometimes simple things like internal links are not rendered
| properly by Pandoc in the generated output.
|
| So what's the best format to write the input in? Any ideas?
| Opinions?
| mooreds wrote:
| I'd use leanpub markdown. They generate those formats plus you
| get a page for the book, can charge for it, and advertise it.
| (Some of those tasks cost money).
|
| Won't work if you want to keep everything local, though.
| mapreduce wrote:
| Thanks! Didn't know Leanpub has its own markdown too. Yes I
| do want to keep everything local.
| mooreds wrote:
| Ah, then probably not a fit.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I came here to say the same thing. Laying content out for a
| book comes with way more issues than "just" converting
| between document formats. Leanpub does it well out of the
| box.
|
| If you want to look down the path of implementing book layout
| yourself, here are two breadcrumbs from my bookmarks:
|
| https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/03/bringing-my-
| we...
|
| https://iangmcdowell.com/blog/posts/laying-out-a-book-
| with-c...
| mooreds wrote:
| For leanpub, I started using it for the layout. And kept
| using it for the marketing.
|
| That's one thing I learned, having written a couple of
| books. Even though writing is tough, it is easier in many
| wyas than the marketing.
| peterhull90 wrote:
| Might depend on what kind of book it is - do you have a lot of
| images, tables, cross-references, ... or is it mostly plain
| text?
| mapreduce wrote:
| Mostly plain text but some images, tables and cross-
| references too.
| babel_ wrote:
| Personally, whatever helps with the specific writing part of it
| all the most is what's best. If you find writing in a given
| dialect of Markdown or LaTeX or Org-mode is easiest, do that.
| For me, that's Markdown with embedded LaTeX, for others it's
| Org-mode, or RST, and so on.
|
| Pandoc handles these fairly seamlessly, and with many options
| for PDF engines, though I'd say it has a preference for LaTeX
| and HTML in the backend and Markdown in the frontend, based on
| my experiences with the edge cases (sometimes entirely solvable
| with a little Haskell or Lua).
|
| Since LaTeX is the default for PDFs, it pays to keep that in
| mind and help LaTeX help you (you can use it inline with
| Markdown or included as preamble in configuration), but
| sometimes I've just had better luck converting via HTML to PDF
| ("-t html output.pdf" or directly chaining on from output.html)
| for what I'm writing in the moment, though other times I'm not
| stressing LaTeX as much and can just go straight from Markdown
| to PDF (for example, just writing up something with inline
| maths). I prefer to avoid LaTeX or HTML's escaped character
| encoding and often need far more than a single Latin font can
| provide, so I've ended up dealing with LaTeX's limitations here
| (even in lualatex and xelatex) more than what I'd suspect is
| typical. Meanwhile, the standard HTML to PDF backend uses Qt,
| and I've found it works for everything else I've needed when
| LaTeX isn't the right backend (and it does come up). On one
| occasion, I did have to switch that to weasyprint, and that was
| everything sorted. Alternative backends is an unsung power that
| few have, while pandoc not only has many built-in (or it is at
| least internally aware of) but will also integrate with any CLI
| needed.
|
| Output to all three with HTML, EPUB, and PDF can just need a
| bit of fiddling before it comes out right, depending on how
| much you're willing to mess with specific metadata for each
| versus accepting the limits of what Pandoc can handle
| universally in its AST. Invariably, some compromise is
| required, but the core semantics of Markdown (including
| extensions) almost always translate without an issue. The
| dialect problem of Markdown is really just in the confluence of
| said semantics with things that have not been separately
| included, such as the lack of an actual header in Markdown
| (Pandoc here allows YAML for some, or you just fall back to
| HTML).
|
| So, tldr; there's no "best" input format, except the one that
| you find most comfortable to just write the book in, but I find
| Pandoc is usually best approached from Markdown with the LaTeX
| or HTML backends. It's powerful and oh so very handy, but it's
| not going to do all the thinking for you, just a lot of the
| grunt work, same as any other tool. When in doubt, the user
| manual is quite readable, and I've found it answered almost
| every question I had. When it doesn't, other people do, and
| when they don't, it means I'm either going about it the wrong
| way or I get to solve an actual problem (but usually the
| former). But, as always, the most important thing is actually
| writing it, distribution comes later, so focus your efforts on
| that and the tools you need to do that effectively.
| mapreduce wrote:
| > If you find writing in a given dialect of Markdown or LaTeX
| or Org-mode is easiest, do that.
|
| I find Org-mode the easiest but like I said in my comment,
| the conversion quality is not great. Pandoc breaks a lot of
| stuff in Org-mode in edge cases. One example I shared in my
| comment was Pandoc breaking internal links.
|
| So by selecting something I find the easiest I have burned
| many hours of troubleshooting figuring out why the output
| does not look right.
|
| That's why I want to draw upon the wisdom of the community
| here to find out which input format works best and by best I
| mean flawlessly. No edge case issues. No rendering flaws. If
| I get the specific recommendations, I'll try them out for
| sometime and then commit myself to it instead of burning more
| time trialling all of the different input formats.
| babel_ wrote:
| Unfortunately, the perfect is very much the enemy of the
| good here. Aside from HTML, I'm afraid that PDF and EPUB
| are very much driven by purpose-built tools designed to
| show interactively what it will look like as output. This
| means that they've both delved into a depth of subtle
| semantic differences that makes flawless output an
| extremely difficult task. Of course, practically, pandoc
| can resolve the vast majority of what people actually use,
| but everything will still be hit by edge cases from time to
| time, leading to subtle issues or incompatibilities between
| EPUB, PDF, and HTML. Each edge case can, of course, be
| solved in isolation, so finding something that's solved the
| ones you are encountering already is the ideal, providing a
| seamless experience for your work. Sadly, each of those is
| built to solve someone else's specific work, and so
| sometimes we just have to accept that we either need to
| compromise on something, we need to paper over the gaps by
| combining the right tools, or we have to write something
| ourselves. Fortunately, it isn't the 80s anymore, so many
| of the tools we have are the "right" ones, and pandoc is
| very good at combining them.
|
| Again, I find that Markdown (with inline LaTeX or HTML)
| seems to be Pandoc's preferred starting point, and that the
| HTML backends are quite useful (particularly when not
| needing full LaTeX), so perhaps there's some luck to be had
| there, since HTML may preserve Org's linking and such a bit
| better, though I don't use Org myself so can't attest to
| it. And if there's really a problem, then perhaps Pandoc
| needs some help sorting Org-mode out!
| mapreduce wrote:
| Great comment! Thanks for engaging in this discussion and
| offering some good perspective about my Pandoc issues.
| Really appreciate it!
| mncharity wrote:
| Riffing on crafting pipelines by combining tools...
|
| Org mode can also export html and markdown, so that's
| three potential pandoc inputs, with potentially different
| properties. All of which might be massaged before input.
| And in extremity, an org-mode parser permits emitting
| customized input. Then pandoc's parsing and filters
| permit altering the pandoc ast in flight. And the ast
| isn't hard (assuming comfort with ASTs), so if some other
| tool has templates and output one likes, one might skip
| the pandoc backend and emit it oneself from pandoc ast
| json. Rather than hoping to persuade that other tool to
| both accept and generate what's needed.
|
| So for instance, last year I had a project written in a
| project-specific markdown dialect, kludged to pandoc-
| flavored markdown, parsed with `pandoc -t json`, and html
| emitted custom from the pandoc ast. With embedded
| directives from dialect to emitter. And html templates
| copied from non-pandoc tools. In a language with nice
| pattern matching (julia's Match), the emitter was a short
| page of code.
|
| "Avoid reinventing wheels, but sometimes it's easier to
| assemble a satisficing custom vehicle, than to find and
| adapt a previously-built one."
| Diti wrote:
| Is there any reason for why you're not considering AsciiDoc?
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Seconding this. Asciidoc was created to be a simple mapping
| to DocBook - which was specifically designed for writing
| books. It should be able to handle everything you need, but
| if there is some esoteric requirement, you can write your own
| processor.
|
| Then again, content is king. Write it on napkins if you must.
| When complete, you can spend two days to transcribe to
| whatever format the publisher requires.
| mapreduce wrote:
| No such reason. I'm willing to try out AsciiDoc.
|
| I mean I did not try AsciiDoc until now because there are so
| many choices of input formats and the ones I've tried so far
| have been disappointing one way or the other.
|
| I talked about Org-mode rendering broken in edge cases. Same
| with Latex too. I see Pandoc has first-class support for its
| own Pandoc Markdown format. But the support for all other
| input formats seem patchy.
|
| If you think Pandoc has good support for AsciiDoc without any
| edge case issues, I'll be most certainly trying it out.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Pandoc has no support for asciidoctor as an input format --
| you're expected to just use asciidoctor itself to convert
| adoc files (and there's no reason not to). Asciidoctor can
| do HTML and PDF, not sure about EPUB though.
| troupe wrote:
| What snet0 suggested might be your best bet. You can use pandoc
| markdown but then slip into LaTex if you need to do something
| more complicated.
| mapreduce wrote:
| If anyone else was looking for what snet0 suggested and
| where, here's their comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39227851
| robobro wrote:
| I've translated HTML markup to Markdown, and from Markdown to
| LaTeX before fine-tuning the LaTeX, to produce PDFs for
| printing hard-cover books.
|
| Does Markdown have any way to specify eg "begin a chapter on a
| new page" ? I don't think this is really a thing in Markdown or
| HTML but I'm admittedly a casual Pandoc user.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| If you are writing a book, presumably you would have each
| chapter in a separate markdown file.
|
| So, then you convert each chapter file to pdf, and then join
| the pdfs.
| starkparker wrote:
| You can inline LaTeX chapter/section break commands even
| when processing Markdown, and in several ways (dropping
| \newpage directly in the content before chapters, using
| header templates, as YAML metadata in the Markdown file,
| even on the command line).
|
| Google has many examples; one's here using a header file:
| https://medium.com/@sydasif78/book-creation-with-pandoc-
| and-...
|
| More are here, including an example using the header-
| includes YAML metadata param:
| https://github.com/Wandmalfarbe/pandoc-latex-
| template/issues...
| w10-1 wrote:
| Like others above, I write long form in Word/docx and convert
| with pandoc. Word supports styles that help experiment
| document-wide with look, it has an outline mode that helps with
| re-organizing material, and it handles inline media gracefully.
| Any of that is painful in markdown. There's no way I would
| write 20-500 page document without Word.
|
| I use markdown for the 90% of my writing that is blurbs (and
| parse it into something like a graph/knowledge kb, and often
| render via pandoc to pdf, word, Anki, and html).
|
| In both cases, I restrict myself to using features that can be
| parsed.
| kccqzy wrote:
| If you are committed to using Pandoc to generate the three
| formats then I don't see why you can't commit to Pandoc's
| flavor of markdown.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is not a good answer. Markdown is a poor format and there
| are a number of almost compatible variations. However Markdown
| in all formats is somewhat limited and so there will be some
| things you cannot do that if you work on a complex project you
| will want to work on.
|
| However markdown - if you stick with the subset that everyone
| supports is the most widely supported alternative. If you go
| with a specific markdown you lose support for something else
| you might want. If you go for non-markdown you will lose
| support for most of the world.
|
| I personally selected restructured text which is really
| powerful for the complex documentation I'm trying to create.
| However I keep running into nothing else supports it problems
| (I can extract doxygen from C++ - but only with tools that
| don't support the latest. I haven't figured out what to do
| about Rust documentation)
| gen220 wrote:
| If you're familiar with markdown and your book is basically
| text with some images, I'd strongly recommend Pandoc Markdown.
|
| Pandoc Markdown-as-input is probably the best-supported input
| format for Pandoc, as far as "reasonable defaults for outputs
| in other formats" is concerned, and it's broadly compatible
| with the norms of other markdown styles.
|
| You can always drop into latex, include custom CSS headers,
| etc. It's also a format where the "formatting" won't generally
| get in the way of actually-writing, unlike HTML or LaTeX
| (speaking on behalf of mere-mortals, here).
| meonkeys wrote:
| Nice! Good luck.
|
| I'm writing a small book. I shared my experiences with Pandoc
| and Asciidoctor in case it helps you or anyone:
|
| https://adammonsen.com/post/2122/
|
| Your use case may differ from mine (I didn't see you mention
| printing), but my anecdote above might help suss out tooling
| differences between Pandoc and Asciidoctor.
|
| Here's an example printable book generator using Asciidoctor
| PDF:
|
| https://github.com/meonkeys/print-this/
| pronoiac wrote:
| My opinions: * write in Pandoc Markdown. * give each sentence
| its own line. It helps with composing and reordering, and gives
| much cleaner diffs if you keep this in a git repo. *
| personally, I used GitHub for html, Pandoc to make the epub,
| then Calibre to turn the epub into a pdf.
|
| The "internal links" thing is a pain, admittedly. I have an
| idea for a workaround:
|
| * sprinkle hidden, unique <a id="ch1.2"></a> around
|
| * on GitHub, use links like chapter1#ch1.2
|
| * for Pandoc, preprocess to remove the filename before the #
|
| I'm working with a big enough book that it's an undertaking, so
| I haven't done this yet.
| uneekname wrote:
| Interesting idea re:internal links. For sufficiently complex
| issues of this nature, pandoc filters[0] are a powerful tool
| for this kind of mid-conversion processing. I've made some
| cool projects with the Python package panflute[1]
|
| [0] https://pandoc.org/filters.html
|
| [1] https://github.com/sergiocorreia/panflute
| severak_cz wrote:
| I have used markdown with custom lua filters for things like
| chapter delimiters, non breaking spaces and notes for inserting
| images. But my setup was kinda wonky as I exported from
| markdown to ODT and then used LibreOffice to convert it to PDF
| while adding images to the layout manually as this is
| impossible to mechanize with LibreOffice.
| ntnsndr wrote:
| I have written several books in pandoc and I love it. I make an
| easy script to output drafts in PDF, docx, odt, and epub with
| one command. I am very happy with pandoc Markdown for this.
| eslaught wrote:
| I'd just use Pandoc Markdown.
|
| For simple things, you can easily write Markdown that is
| compatible with all dialects. Mainly, remember to indent your
| lists 4 spaces if you soft wrap.
|
| But Pandoc Markdown has the most extensive support for other
| extensions, like footnotes, figures, etc. That's useful because
| it minimizes how much HTML or Latex you need to write, which in
| turn makes your documents more portable.
|
| There are other formats that support more features, but in my
| experience the communities are smaller and the syntax is not as
| pretty. Ultimately you're betting on that format continuing to
| exist longer than Pandoc, which I think is not a great bet in
| most cases. The only format which I think might have better
| long-term support and compatibility is CommonMark, but it comes
| at the tradeoff of substantially fewer features. Which again
| means sacrificing portability because everything you can't do
| in the base language you need to do in HTML or Latex.
| susam wrote:
| Pandoc is the FFmpeg of document conversion!
|
| While I am very fond of both tools, Pandoc's command-line
| interface seamlessly integrates with my understanding and
| intuition, unlike FFmpeg's byzantine command line options and
| concepts. With FFmpeg, I frequently find myself documenting
| specific incantations and recipes in my notes, lest I should
| forget how to solve certain conversion problems. Pandoc, on the
| other hand, has spared me from such cognitive overload.
|
| This should not be taken as criticism of FFmpeg though. FFmpeg is
| solving very complex problems too. Both Pandoc and FFmpeg are
| excellent tools. Both tools have saved me hundreds of hours of
| research, experimentation, trial and error, etc.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| While looking for Pandoc + Make for Website templates, I stumbled
| on the Website of Jilles van Gurp[1] (hi @jillesvangurp[2]) and I
| have seen it evolved over time. It is beautiful[3].
|
| 1. https://www.jillesvangurp.com
|
| 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jillesvangurp
|
| 3. https://github.com/jillesvangurp/www.jillesvangurp.com
| jjice wrote:
| I've been (slowly) writing a book for about a year and a half now
| probably, and Pandoc has made it so easy. I write everything in
| Markdown and use a seven-ish line Makefile and that's it. It
| generates the PDF and EPUB both extremely well and the
| customizability of everything in the generation process is
| fantastic.
|
| I end up using it for random doc generation too in my day to day.
| It's just a damn fine piece of software that always works and has
| every feature I could dream up for my use cases.
| Urfiner wrote:
| A few weeks ago I wrote a MediaWiki extension which uses it to
| convert documents to wiki articles
|
| https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PandocUltimateConvert...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I have develop a commercial data wrangling tool (Easy Data
| Transform) that outputs data tables to CSV, Excel, markdown, XML,
| JSON etc. It would be neat to support output to some of the other
| formats supported by Pandoc, such as DOCX, PPTX, PDF, Latex etc.
|
| Has anyone tried integrating the Pandoc command line tool into a
| desktop product on Windows or Mac?
|
| How big is it?
|
| What are the licensing implications of shipping it with my
| (closed source) software?
| ruune wrote:
| (not a lawyer, not legal advice) With Pandoc being GPLv3 you
| can't just link it with your software. Distributing pandoc
| standalone (different, unmodified binary) and calling it from
| your software should be okay as they're technically different
| programs. Probably requires further investigation and maybe a
| lawyer though.
| _kb wrote:
| Such a beautifully effective tool.
|
| The static site generator for my personal site is just it with a
| thin bash script wrapper: https://git.sr.ht/~kb/open-
| notes/tree/main/item/.build.sh.
|
| So much simpler than pulling a universe of node modules.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Recently I learned pandoc can act as a web server, and that the
| type system of Haskell itself provides a strong security
| guarantee that nothing will ever be written to disk, because
| nobody understands the IO Monad. Security through obscurity!
| habosa wrote:
| One of the best pieces of software you'll ever use. And if you do
| find a bug, the maintainer will fix it within hours of your
| Github report.
| gampleman wrote:
| The latest website I was asked to build is just Pandoc + Make. It
| works super well, it's very fast and decently flexible. I even do
| blog-like processing by just calling Pandoc several times.
| rollcat wrote:
| I used to build my blog with Pandoc, make, and a little bit of
| Python/Jinja2 glue to generate indexes/tags/RSS. The amount of
| glue tends to get out of hand as the project's needs grow
| though.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| I recently switched to Pandoc to parse my Markdown documents for
| my blog. Up until then I used the original Perl script. It's not
| slower _and_ I get syntax highlighting for my code snippets. My
| only regret is not switching _sooner_.
|
| Maybe one day I'll write a blazing fast Markdown parser that does
| exactly what I want, full control and maximum simplicity and all
| that. In all probability though, I won't. I really like what
| little I have seen from Pandoc.
| jamesdhutton wrote:
| I used Pandoc recently to convert a large Word document into
| markdown. It took a lot of babysitting and manual tweaking to get
| to the final result. Overall it probably still saved me time
| compared to doing the conversion manually, but only just. YMMV.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Pandoc is amazing. I think of it kind of like ffmpeg for text
| files...
| emeril wrote:
| great analogy
| johncole wrote:
| I love Pandoc. I wish the python library were a little more
| accessible.
| darrenBaldwin03 wrote:
| This is sick!
| jovezhong wrote:
| I mainly use Typora for markdown editing and saving as PDF
|
| Just check pandoc installation and get started guide.
| Overwhelmingly detailed, like I never use command line before.
| Maybe it assumes many users of pandoc are writers or Information
| Developer, without much tech skills.
| rexysmexy wrote:
| Absolutely love Pandoc. I used it through my undergrad to take
| notes for all of my courses. Markdown with inlined LaTeX just
| made sense.
|
| It made university more accessible, as I get frequent hand cramps
| while writing notes. So I started to take them with Pandoc and
| added custom macros.
|
| The best feeling was when professors would ask for a copy of my
| notes at the end of the term because they were formatted so well!
| eichin wrote:
| I had a one-off requirement for a slide deck for something, and I
| _really_ don 't think in that form - so I ended up writing a
| detailed outline in markdown, using pandoc to turn that into
| pptx, and then checking that in libreoffice. Worked surprisingly
| well; I didn't have a style to conform to (so I don't know how
| well libreoffice handled those) but the defaults worked out.
| dineshkumar_cs wrote:
| I've been using it to generate Docx/PDF from my markdown. Just
| started to explore means to customize (with tex template). Recent
| updated obsidian plugin requires explicitly configuring pandoc
| with latex which started the rabbithole customizing experiment :)
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| Pandoc is amazing. I'm an architect so I use a lot of InDesign.
| But of course it's not good for intensively editing the text
| itself, it's a presentation tool. Everyone I know just uses Word
| and copies and pastes. The poor souls.
|
| I learned LaTeX late in life for a few reasons: - I publish in
| journals that all have different layout requirements, so
| reformatting to submit to more than one is a big pain. - Using a
| non-WSYIWYG editor enforces clarity. It's a lot easier to see
| each sentence as a whole. If a sentence is longer than a single
| line in VSCode it should probably be more than one sentence. -
| The features of an IDE allow you to see each line (sentence) in
| one place, and move things around more flexibly with the IDE
| shortcuts. You can easily rearrange the flow of a text. And of
| course you can make inline comments without having to clean them
| up before sending the doc somewhere. - I don't have to care about
| things like image placement and anchoring in the text until
| output. This is an area that WYSIWYG editors like Word are
| particularly painful.
|
| There are other reasons like equations and notations, but that's
| enough for now. All that said here's my workflow:
|
| I write LaTeX in VSCode (soon switching to vim). Then, I can use
| Pandoc to convert to Word if I need to (it's still where most of
| the templates come from in the discipline). This is also helpful
| in working with collaborators in my area since they typically
| won't know LaTeX.
|
| Here's where it gets fun - I write LaTex, then use Pandoc to
| output directly to .icml (InDesign Markup). These link directly
| in my InDesign document, and so I can edit text where it's better
| and more clear to edit (IDE), then seamlessly get it into the
| environment where I have maximum layout control. I haven't gotten
| to do this so many times that I need to write a script to
| automate conversion as part of my tex build, but I probably will
| soon for fun.
|
| Pandoc just works so well, allowing me to concentrate on making
| good content and not having to sweat all the annoying file
| conversion details. Thank you to the developers and maintainers.
| matijash wrote:
| I see a Haskell project, I upvote.
| emeril wrote:
| the svg on the side of their page is kind of hilarious
|
| though I've used this program too in the past to seamlessly
| convert html to text to easily import into a database...
| w10-1 wrote:
| The author is great - smart and responsive.
|
| He's inspired a small number of long-time, serious contributors.
|
| Together they maintain a super-high-traffic utility that
| simplifies the very arbitrary complexity of document formats for
| untold millions of users.
|
| It's really a stunning example of social good.
| golly_ned wrote:
| Besides that, he's a tremendous philosophy professor. I took a
| class with him years ago. Besides being brilliant, I found him
| funny, approachable, and never condescending, which is rare for
| philosophy professors of his renown.
| pbhowmic wrote:
| In a world where most READMEs and the like are in Markdown format
| I like to use Asciidoc and I like to keep the two in sync using
| pandoc
| globular-toast wrote:
| I worked in a place where I was expected to produce documents in
| docx format. Having spend the last few years using TeX or just
| writing plain markdown stuff this was quite unappealing. So I
| opened Word once, created a template, and from then on used
| markdown to write documents (or perhaps it was org-mode). I never
| had to open Word again apart from making sure they looked OK. My
| documents looked better than everyone else's.
|
| In a way, I hope I never have to use Pandoc again, but I'd hate
| for it to not exist.
| lh4221 wrote:
| Pandoc is probably the best-maintained open-source software that
| I've ever worked with. We use it a lot internally at Column, and
| every time we've opened an issue, it has been comprehensively
| resolved in <24 hours. I'm a GitHub Sponsor and it's up there
| with coffee with the best money I spend on a monthly basis. JGM,
| you are a gift to everyone who spends too much time parsing word
| documents.
| ElectronBadger wrote:
| I do all my scientific writing in Markdown (SublimeText + JabRef
| for bibliography). In ST I have a macro that runs Pandoc to
| convert .md files to .odt/.odp, including images and formatted
| references. Wonderful program to work with.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I have many books underway and I'd like to use pandoc in my
| automated artifact gen workflow, especially for makkng epub
| files. But I have not got it working the way I want yet.
|
| In theory I like its design. as a CLI guy
| franze wrote:
| Here is the obligatory "Chat with Pandoc" - GPT
|
| https://chat.openai.com/g/g-YX1CmSAA9-franz-enzenhofer-pando...
|
| installs pandoc and then you can interact with it via chat
| interface.
|
| sad that to PDF conversion does not work, as it would need
| pdflatex and I can't find a simple downloadable version (amd 64
| linux) anywhere on the internet. If you have one on hand, please
| link it. I willl upload it, too. then PDF conversion will work.
| mrinterweb wrote:
| Atlassian's Jira wiki format and text editing tools drive me up
| the wall. There's something about how Atlassian does UX that
| rarely agrees with me. If I write markdown in a sensible editor
| (Obsidian), and convert it to Jira wiki, that's a big win for me.
| Love projects like this.
| drojas wrote:
| I have used it to kickstart a blogging project that I wish to
| come back to soon. The Lua inter-op for custom readers, writers
| and filters is great but I wish there was more editor integration
| and even perhaps an official IDE/editor with built-in debugging
| features (probably something already do-able with Emacs but I
| haven't checked). The only blocker for my project is no support
| for "ChunkedDoc" for Lua filters [1] which forces me to write
| more code and a complicated Makefile.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/9061
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