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Pandoc is great but I think it falls a bit short of being a Swiss army knife; there are a lot of conversions it cannot do, like PDF-to-anything. Thankfully Cal
by bigbubba 6y ago
Pandoc is great but I think it falls a bit short of being a Swiss army knife; there are a lot of conversions it cannot do, like PDF-to-anything. Thankfully Calibre's 'ebook-convert' tool covers many of pandoc's blindspots.
- Miiko 6y agoBut real Swiss army knife does not include any magic either - even simply extracting text from PDF (ignoring all formatting) is completely non-trivial. Do not know any (non-magical) specialized tool that can convert PDF formatting.
- bigbubba 6y agoCalibre (`ebook-convert`) makes a decent attempt at converting PDFs to other formats. This of course is very far from perfect, but it takes a good stab at it and I've sometimes found the results to be usable (often with some manual cleanup.) Another example where Caliber compliments Pandoc well is when generating ebooks for sideloading onto kindles. Pandoc can create epubs which Calibre can in turn convert to mobi.
- systemvoltage 6y agoExactly, Pandoc chooses robustness over buggy half baked conversion. Swiss Army Knife is no good when you need to a debone a Tuna. Every tool on a Swiss Army Knife is sub-optimal. It's a terrible popular analogy in general.
- bigbubba 6y agoI don't know much about tuna, but I once cleaned a bass with my swiss army knife. Anyway, I don't really expect Pandoc to do everything, but when you have both Calibre and Pandoc in your toolbox, it sure feels like you could manage close to anything.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]