5 ms·

Happy 10th birthday pandoc

227 points by psibi 10y ago

ausjke 10y ago
Using it all the time and love it. The only issue I had though is that it does not convert certain charset sometimes due to some latex related issues.
wiz21c 10y ago
I like it but it still makes my life hard when I want to use french typography...
- posterboy 10y ago
  > makes my life harder You are free to use something else or better
- FraaJad 10y ago
  I know nothing about French typography.. having said that.. pandoc allows you to use different LaTeX templates than the ones it ships with. So, you can take the default templates, add the overrides necessary for French typography and voilà! (hopefully).
- RaitoBezarius 10y ago
  Do you do --- lang: fr --- In your document? I find that pandoc + french typography = love as it is using LaTeX under the hood and LaTeX have pretty decent rules for French Typography (better than Microsoft Word IMHO).
kingkilr 10y ago
Happy Birthday Pandoc! The ability to write and collaborate on memos in markdown, and turn them into fancy PDFs and .docs is seriously world changing.
- criddell 10y ago
  I'm working on some mechanical engineering software that produces a report that is heavy in tables and equations. Today we are generating html for display and have an option to output the same report in pdf form. We use htmldoc to do the html->pdf conversion. htmldoc is unbelievably fast, it's also quite limited. It doesn't know about Unicode or CSS. We've tried other more capable converters but they are an order of magnitude slower than htmldoc. I guess Unicode and CSS support is expensive. htmldoc is also better than anything else we've tried at not putting page breaks in the middle of a table. Would you say this type of report generation is something than Pandoc would be suited for?
  - FraaJad 10y ago
    I'm a big fan of Pandoc. However, if you have a lot of tables in your document, ASCIIDOCTOR is a better choice to produce PDFs. ASCIIDOCTOR has clear and superior table formatting syntax and more importantly it can work with CSV files. This way you don't have to copy paste data into your reports. http://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables http://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables
    - criddell 10y ago
      I've never heard of ASCIIDOCTOR before. Thanks for the pointer.
    - zzleeper 10y ago
      I agree that copy-pasting CSV files is undesirable, but there are several Pandoc filters, both in Haskell and Python, that allow you to embed CSVs into tables without much hassle.
    - tome 10y ago
      Sounds like the next format that pandoc should support :)
      - FraaJad 10y ago
planteen 10y ago
I love the markdown to PDF converter using embedded LaTeX for math expressions. So much easier than writing pure LaTeX and you still get a beautiful result.
jesuslop 10y ago
Keep going and enhancing
therealmarv 10y ago
Great project. Have written my whole thesis in Markdown thanks to Pandoc (+Sublime+Latex+Zotero) and this great template https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown
0xmohit 10y ago
A huge thanks to John and all the contributors. What's most amazing is it's ability to generate beautiful outputs (for printing, viewing, presentations alike). Awesome.
Uehreka 10y ago
Thanks to Pandoc, I never need to use Microsoft Word at work. If someone wants me to upload some documentation to Sharepoint, I just write it in Markdown and convert to docx with Pandoc. Wonderful piece of software.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  How do you update someone else's document?
erelde 10y ago
Happy birthday, I used it for both outputting pdf, and often when encountering a very long html pages without styling (quite common around these parts) to output epub.
drostie 10y ago
Happy birthday! Pandoc is one of those things that I only recently discovered and totally fell in love with: I wrote a bunch of code in literate Haskell for work, so that I could have the logic right, and then ported it to JS to reduce the bus factor of the project. When I discovered pandoc I just ran it on my literate Haskell and the resulting PDF was so beautiful I had to print it out and tack it up on a cubicle wall, like a "this is what they pay me for" type of reminder.
Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
I have started using pandoc again recently since thier org support has gotten a lot better in recent months. Using emacs, it is not a very hard decision to use org mode over markdown or rst. With org support in pandoc, i no longer have to start up emacs to generate HTML for my website, so doing that in batches just got a lot easier.
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  I found it's conversion into org (from OPML) isn't fantastic, but definitely workable. But out of org is seamless for me as well.
mtrn 10y ago
Pandoc's Markdown to Word conversion saved me when I was writing a book. Thanks and happy birthday!
hypertexthero 10y ago
I love Pandoc! Thank you, [John MacFarlane](http://johnmacfarlane.net/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/)!
ggambetta 10y ago
Happy birthday, Pandoc! Pandoc is a key component in my Markdown-to-Kindle-and-Paperback pipeline. In fact I've soft-published an article about it: https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-and-published-my-novel-using-only-open-source-tools-5cdfbd7c00ca https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-and-publishe... Amazing piece of software. Not that often a tool dominates an use case so thoroughly that there are virtually no alternatives, because there really is no need. Thank you, John MacFarlane :)
- thangalin 10y ago
  I had a problem converting embedded images and fonts from Markdown to EPUB; this script helps by piggy-backing on the epub-embed-font option to include images: #!/bin/bash FILENAME=$(cat title.txt).epub CSS=style.css IMAGES_DIR=images # Ensure images get embedded into the document. for url in $(grep image $CSS | grep url | sed 's/.*url( *$.*$ *).*/\1/g'); do EMBED="$EMBED --epub-embed-font=$IMAGES_DIR/$url" done # Generate the ePub, including fonts and images. pandoc \ --smart \ --epub-cover-image=cover/cover.png \ --epub-metadata=metadata.xml \ --epub-stylesheet=$CSS \ --epub-embed-font=fonts/MyUnderwood.ttf \ $EMBED \ -t epub -o $FILENAME output/*.vars The .vars files are chapters that have their variable names substituted for values, such as: for i in chapter/*.md; do out=$OUTDIR/$(basename $i); cat variables.yaml $i > $out; pandoc $out --template $out > $out.vars cat $out.vars | sed -e 's/;;/\$/g' |\ pandoc --chapters -t context -o $OUTDIR/$(basename $i .md).tex; done A handy trick to avoid duplication (of names, places, or any text really) within the content.
jackmaney 10y ago
Pandoc is fantastic! Just a few days ago, I used it in a makefile to keep markdown, HTML, and PDF versions of my resume in sync.
chewyshine 10y ago
Awesome productivity tool. Pandoc changed my entire document preparation workflow. Thank you!
jesserosenthal 10y ago
A couple of cool things about pandoc: 1. It's a tool built in large part by folks involved in the humanities. John, of course, is a professor of philosophy. (We could stop there, since his contributions so outnumber all the others, but I'll go on...) I'm an assistant prof. of English. It has large contributions from the curator of medieval manuscripts at the British Library, and contributions from a historian as well. And those are just the ones that come to mind -- I'm sure there are others. It's cool to have a tool used by many folks in the humanities, but also in large part driven by their needs. 2. John is a great project lead, and it's an amazingly open project. If you're interested in getting started with haskell, the filters API allows you to really adapt it to your needs. And if you're interested in adding another reader or writer, there's a good chance it can be added. For myself, I started out using the python docx library, found it didn't handle enough stuff, wrote one myself (covering mainly my conversion needs, not creation) and had it output JSON that pandoc could read. When that worked, I ported it to haskell, and posted it to the mailing list. Within a few weeks, the docx reader was part of the program. It's been a great experience -- both in using haskell, and in playing a significant role in a program I use and love.
ihm 10y ago
Thanks so much to all the contributors for such a useful tool. I use it to convert markdown posts with embedded Latex to HTML for my blog.
j0e1 10y ago
Enough of procrastination. It's time to finally start learning Haskell!
dergachev 10y ago
What an amazing project! I use it all the time, for converting between textile (redmine) and markdown (everything else), and also for extracting my company's proposals from Google Drive, and converting them to latex and PDF with our customized template. The code for this is all here: https://github.com/dergachev/gdocs-export https://github.com/dergachev/gdocs-export Thanks so much to it's creators and contributors!
- nandhp 10y ago
  Redmine actually has a Markdown mode, though it's probably too much work to convert an existing Redmine installation (unless you can use pandoc?) http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineTextFormatting http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineTextForm...
confounded 10y ago
Pandoc has made the recent push for reproducible research across the sciences possible (via Rmarkdown/knitr and IPython/Jupyter) --- it's an essential part of solving a pretty big epistemological problem! (For me, it's also a large part of solving my own productivity problems.) It's also driven markdown itself to become more feature rich and internally consistent. I'm extremely appreciative of JGM's efforts to product a unified markdown spec[^1]. Huge thanks, John! [^1]: http://commonmark.org/ http://commonmark.org/
zwetan 10y ago
I love pandoc, thanks for this great tool :) to me it's the perfect tool to generate user docs and manuals for software and other cli tools, my best use case is markdown (github flavoured) to man, markdown to HTML and PDF, etc.
ssebastianj 10y ago
Pandoc just make me happy. Thanks John & contributors for your work!
dredmorbius 10y ago
It feels redundant to say this with all the others expressing the same thoughts, but thank you thank you thank you John et al for Pandoc. It's been life-changing since running into it a few years back. I do a lot of work researching older and historical documents. Some of these are available in only scans, meaning image-heavy PDFs, or rotten OCR transcriptions. Occasionally I get lucky and find a solid ASCII source. A recent case in point, Dugald Stewart's 1793 "Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith", which I'd found in ASCII format. A couple hours (mostly of finessing the markup) to pandoc, and I had a 72 page PDF, ePub, and HTML versions, the former two posted online. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/-h-b6ek6segi8eamq2g6vq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/-h-b6ek6segi8eamq2g6vq ASCII Source: http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/dugald http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/duga... Markdown: http://pastebin.com/LdKXpHdR http://pastebin.com/LdKXpHdR PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPY0tfaXlQWUNwLWc/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPY0tfaXlQWUNwLWc... ePub: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPdXgwcm1NbDhQdEE/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPdXgwcm1NbDhQdEE... (The Google Drive docs should be world-readable.) That's only one of many docs I've fixed up using Pandoc.
jgalt212 10y ago
Is pandoc the most famous/most used program written in Haskell?
- codygman 10y ago
  I think it's the most used by non haskeller's. I'd say most used and most famous is the ghc Haskell compiler.

227 points by psibi 10y ago

Using it all the time and love it. The only issue I had though is that it does not convert certain charset sometimes due to some latex related issues.

wiz21c 10y ago

I like it but it still makes my life hard when I want to use french typography...

posterboy 10y ago
> makes my life harder You are free to use something else or better
FraaJad 10y ago
I know nothing about French typography.. having said that.. pandoc allows you to use different LaTeX templates than the ones it ships with. So, you can take the default templates, add the overrides necessary for French typography and voilà! (hopefully).
RaitoBezarius 10y ago
Do you do --- lang: fr --- In your document? I find that pandoc + french typography = love as it is using LaTeX under the hood and LaTeX have pretty decent rules for French Typography (better than Microsoft Word IMHO).

kingkilr 10y ago

Happy Birthday Pandoc! The ability to write and collaborate on memos in markdown, and turn them into fancy PDFs and .docs is seriously world changing.

criddell 10y ago
I'm working on some mechanical engineering software that produces a report that is heavy in tables and equations. Today we are generating html for display and have an option to output the same report in pdf form. We use htmldoc to do the html->pdf conversion. htmldoc is unbelievably fast, it's also quite limited. It doesn't know about Unicode or CSS. We've tried other more capable converters but they are an order of magnitude slower than htmldoc. I guess Unicode and CSS support is expensive. htmldoc is also better than anything else we've tried at not putting page breaks in the middle of a table. Would you say this type of report generation is something than Pandoc would be suited for?
- FraaJad 10y ago
  I'm a big fan of Pandoc. However, if you have a lot of tables in your document, ASCIIDOCTOR is a better choice to produce PDFs. ASCIIDOCTOR has clear and superior table formatting syntax and more importantly it can work with CSV files. This way you don't have to copy paste data into your reports. http://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables http://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables
  - criddell 10y ago
    I've never heard of ASCIIDOCTOR before. Thanks for the pointer.
  - zzleeper 10y ago
    I agree that copy-pasting CSV files is undesirable, but there are several Pandoc filters, both in Haskell and Python, that allow you to embed CSVs into tables without much hassle.
  - tome 10y ago
    Sounds like the next format that pandoc should support :)
    - FraaJad 10y ago

planteen 10y ago

I love the markdown to PDF converter using embedded LaTeX for math expressions. So much easier than writing pure LaTeX and you still get a beautiful result.

jesuslop 10y ago

Keep going and enhancing

therealmarv 10y ago

Great project. Have written my whole thesis in Markdown thanks to Pandoc (+Sublime+Latex+Zotero) and this great template https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown

0xmohit 10y ago

A huge thanks to John and all the contributors. What's most amazing is it's ability to generate beautiful outputs (for printing, viewing, presentations alike). Awesome.

Uehreka 10y ago

Thanks to Pandoc, I never need to use Microsoft Word at work. If someone wants me to upload some documentation to Sharepoint, I just write it in Markdown and convert to docx with Pandoc. Wonderful piece of software.

bbcbasic 10y ago
How do you update someone else's document?

erelde 10y ago

Happy birthday, I used it for both outputting pdf, and often when encountering a very long html pages without styling (quite common around these parts) to output epub.

drostie 10y ago

Happy birthday! Pandoc is one of those things that I only recently discovered and totally fell in love with: I wrote a bunch of code in literate Haskell for work, so that I could have the logic right, and then ported it to JS to reduce the bus factor of the project. When I discovered pandoc I just ran it on my literate Haskell and the resulting PDF was so beautiful I had to print it out and tack it up on a cubicle wall, like a "this is what they pay me for" type of reminder.

Johnny_Brahms 10y ago

I have started using pandoc again recently since thier org support has gotten a lot better in recent months. Using emacs, it is not a very hard decision to use org mode over markdown or rst. With org support in pandoc, i no longer have to start up emacs to generate HTML for my website, so doing that in batches just got a lot easier.

stinkytaco 10y ago
I found it's conversion into org (from OPML) isn't fantastic, but definitely workable. But out of org is seamless for me as well.

mtrn 10y ago

Pandoc's Markdown to Word conversion saved me when I was writing a book. Thanks and happy birthday!

hypertexthero 10y ago

I love Pandoc! Thank you, [John MacFarlane](http://johnmacfarlane.net/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/)!

ggambetta 10y ago

Happy birthday, Pandoc! Pandoc is a key component in my Markdown-to-Kindle-and-Paperback pipeline. In fact I've soft-published an article about it: https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-and-published-my-novel-using-only-open-source-tools-5cdfbd7c00ca https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-and-publishe... Amazing piece of software. Not that often a tool dominates an use case so thoroughly that there are virtually no alternatives, because there really is no need. Thank you, John MacFarlane :)

thangalin 10y ago
I had a problem converting embedded images and fonts from Markdown to EPUB; this script helps by piggy-backing on the epub-embed-font option to include images: #!/bin/bash FILENAME=$(cat title.txt).epub CSS=style.css IMAGES_DIR=images # Ensure images get embedded into the document. for url in $(grep image $CSS | grep url | sed 's/.*url( *$.*$ *).*/\1/g'); do EMBED="$EMBED --epub-embed-font=$IMAGES_DIR/$url" done # Generate the ePub, including fonts and images. pandoc \ --smart \ --epub-cover-image=cover/cover.png \ --epub-metadata=metadata.xml \ --epub-stylesheet=$CSS \ --epub-embed-font=fonts/MyUnderwood.ttf \ $EMBED \ -t epub -o $FILENAME output/*.vars The .vars files are chapters that have their variable names substituted for values, such as: for i in chapter/*.md; do out=$OUTDIR/$(basename $i); cat variables.yaml $i > $out; pandoc $out --template $out > $out.vars cat $out.vars | sed -e 's/;;/\$/g' |\ pandoc --chapters -t context -o $OUTDIR/$(basename $i .md).tex; done A handy trick to avoid duplication (of names, places, or any text really) within the content.

jackmaney 10y ago

Pandoc is fantastic! Just a few days ago, I used it in a makefile to keep markdown, HTML, and PDF versions of my resume in sync.

chewyshine 10y ago

Awesome productivity tool. Pandoc changed my entire document preparation workflow. Thank you!

jesserosenthal 10y ago

A couple of cool things about pandoc: 1. It's a tool built in large part by folks involved in the humanities. John, of course, is a professor of philosophy. (We could stop there, since his contributions so outnumber all the others, but I'll go on...) I'm an assistant prof. of English. It has large contributions from the curator of medieval manuscripts at the British Library, and contributions from a historian as well. And those are just the ones that come to mind -- I'm sure there are others. It's cool to have a tool used by many folks in the humanities, but also in large part driven by their needs. 2. John is a great project lead, and it's an amazingly open project. If you're interested in getting started with haskell, the filters API allows you to really adapt it to your needs. And if you're interested in adding another reader or writer, there's a good chance it can be added. For myself, I started out using the python docx library, found it didn't handle enough stuff, wrote one myself (covering mainly my conversion needs, not creation) and had it output JSON that pandoc could read. When that worked, I ported it to haskell, and posted it to the mailing list. Within a few weeks, the docx reader was part of the program. It's been a great experience -- both in using haskell, and in playing a significant role in a program I use and love.

ihm 10y ago

Thanks so much to all the contributors for such a useful tool. I use it to convert markdown posts with embedded Latex to HTML for my blog.

j0e1 10y ago

Enough of procrastination. It's time to finally start learning Haskell!

dergachev 10y ago

What an amazing project! I use it all the time, for converting between textile (redmine) and markdown (everything else), and also for extracting my company's proposals from Google Drive, and converting them to latex and PDF with our customized template. The code for this is all here: https://github.com/dergachev/gdocs-export https://github.com/dergachev/gdocs-export Thanks so much to it's creators and contributors!

nandhp 10y ago
Redmine actually has a Markdown mode, though it's probably too much work to convert an existing Redmine installation (unless you can use pandoc?) http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineTextFormatting http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineTextForm...

confounded 10y ago

Pandoc has made the recent push for reproducible research across the sciences possible (via Rmarkdown/knitr and IPython/Jupyter) --- it's an essential part of solving a pretty big epistemological problem! (For me, it's also a large part of solving my own productivity problems.) It's also driven markdown itself to become more feature rich and internally consistent. I'm extremely appreciative of JGM's efforts to product a unified markdown spec[^1]. Huge thanks, John! [^1]: http://commonmark.org/ http://commonmark.org/

zwetan 10y ago

I love pandoc, thanks for this great tool :) to me it's the perfect tool to generate user docs and manuals for software and other cli tools, my best use case is markdown (github flavoured) to man, markdown to HTML and PDF, etc.

ssebastianj 10y ago

Pandoc just make me happy. Thanks John & contributors for your work!

dredmorbius 10y ago

It feels redundant to say this with all the others expressing the same thoughts, but thank you thank you thank you John et al for Pandoc. It's been life-changing since running into it a few years back. I do a lot of work researching older and historical documents. Some of these are available in only scans, meaning image-heavy PDFs, or rotten OCR transcriptions. Occasionally I get lucky and find a solid ASCII source. A recent case in point, Dugald Stewart's 1793 "Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith", which I'd found in ASCII format. A couple hours (mostly of finessing the markup) to pandoc, and I had a 72 page PDF, ePub, and HTML versions, the former two posted online. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/-h-b6ek6segi8eamq2g6vq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/-h-b6ek6segi8eamq2g6vq ASCII Source: http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/dugald http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/duga... Markdown: http://pastebin.com/LdKXpHdR http://pastebin.com/LdKXpHdR PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPY0tfaXlQWUNwLWc/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPY0tfaXlQWUNwLWc... ePub: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPdXgwcm1NbDhQdEE/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPdXgwcm1NbDhQdEE... (The Google Drive docs should be world-readable.) That's only one of many docs I've fixed up using Pandoc.

jgalt212 10y ago

Is pandoc the most famous/most used program written in Haskell?

codygman 10y ago
I think it's the most used by non haskeller's. I'd say most used and most famous is the ghc Haskell compiler.