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Pandoc is a great piece of software. As a university teacher and researcher, I use it in three ways: 1. I write markdown for my website and for the websites fo
by maweki 4y ago
Pandoc is a great piece of software. As a university teacher and researcher, I use it in three ways:
1. I write markdown for my website and for the websites for my research projects and simply generate standalone html out of it. Done.
2. When we create electronic exams, the exam platform takes questions using a html-backed rich text editor. We write down our exam questions using markdown, create html document fragments, that we simply paste into the exam platform.
3. When students do electronic exams, we receive xml files from our exam platform. We use python to pass on submissions to different submission checkers (akin to autograders or static analysis) and create yaml files with the student submission and grading suggestions and static analysis annotations. We manually review and grade and comment within the yaml file (that works incredibly well), collect all the data using python and generate markdown reports for each student, including their submission, our comments and scoring. We pass this markdown through pandoc, creating well layouted pdfs which we either print and hand out or send out electronically.
Pandoc fits our yaml+markdown-based processes very well. Only for the actual research papers we still write LaTeX and build pdfs without pandoc.
- WolfOliver 4y agofor the research papers which you write in LaTeX you should have a look at MonsterWriter. Disclaimer: I'm the creator of MonsterWriter and very keen to receive feedback and learn about how universities and their students write papers, thesis, ...
- Terretta 4y agoIt's cool you're using SetApp, thank you. For HN reading along, SetApp is a way to distribute apps and get paid outside the app store. Really, that exists. // Disclosure: Unless you are disavowing your ability as author to offer a recommendation that can be trusted, you probably mean "Disclosure" not "Disclaimer". Disclosure = here is my potential bias. Disclaimer = YMMV, no warranties express or implied.
- WolfOliver 4y agoYou can also download the app without SetApp. No Subscription needed!
- CJefferson 4y agoJust tried opening it. It's looks nice, but I'm going to write some quick, slightly negative, comments, based on your claims about using it. The table formatting is not good enough. It's not obvious how to left-justify a column. It's also not clear how to line a column up along "." (which I often use for numbers). Both of these are fairly easy in LaTeX. The outputted LaTeX looks OK, but it's not obvious how to format -- most journals, and Universities (for PhDs) will have a fixed style you have to use. I suppose I could take the LaTeX and randomly hack it, but then I need to learn LaTeX to fix any issues that causes.
- WolfOliver 4y agoboth fair points, tables need still improvement. Regarding the outputted LaTeX, the idea is to grow the amount of supported templates. So there would be templates for every important journal. For now the focus is to make the thesis template flexible enough that it works for most bachelor/master thesis.
- maweki 4y agoThough I don't really like you advertising, thank you for the suggestion. As a computer science researcher I'll give you some feedback why your application is a total deal-breaker for me and my colleagues: * It's not running on Linux. Nobody in our department runs windows or mac. * We already have huge BibTex citation libraries that we use in papers and just reference the necessary papers. These citation library files grow and grow. I won't manually add citations for each paper. * We collaborate and version through git. If collaborative writing and version control does not work at least as easy as our plaintext-git-handling, that's a hard no. * You do know that for conference or journal submission word and LaTeX templates with given page limits in these templates are given, right? How would I use, say, LNCS in MonsterWriter? Writing seems not to be page-based. How do I know that I'm over the limit? * My wife is a researcher in the social sciences, and they extensively use MS Word's change tracking and merging feature to write papers. If MonsterWriter does not support this in an accessible and visually appealing manner, it would be a hard no for her as well. With your feature set, you're not really targeting researchers, even if you think you do.
- WolfOliver 4y agoThank you for your time to answer, very much appreciated :)
- tambourine_man 4y agoIt seems you're being downvoted for proposing a tool you created and disclaimed as such. I think that's perfectly fine and in the spirit of HN.
- phlummox 4y agoInteresting! I use a very similar process for creating exams and student projects, but am the only one in my department who does so. Are any of your processes/tools publicly available? (Mine are basically cobbled together in Haskell and Python.)
- maweki 4y agoSorry, same. There's such a myriad of e-learning platforms in Germany and I guess it's the same for most countries. I would believe the same goes for our own research static analysis and autotrading platform (in our case SQL) which probably every CS department also has quite a few of. I wouldn't put my hopes up for anything publicly available that fits your platform and has a bus factor higher than 1.
- phlummox 4y agoAh well, I can dream, I guess :) Every now and then, I ponder putting some of my scripts together into something I could actually hand over to someone else, but have not yet had the time.