20 ms·

Pandoc

824 points by swatson741 3y ago

alxmrs 3y ago
Shameless plug: I built a static site generator with Pandoc and shell (with RSS support!). https://github.com/alxmrs/pandoc-website-template https://github.com/alxmrs/pandoc-website-template
ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
Pandoc is amazing and immensely useful. Just in case you need something simpler, let me suggest Hastyscribe. Statically compiled cross-platform program for convertng markdown to self-contained portable HTML with a nice styling embedded by default. Simple, small, fast, hackable, written in Nim. https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe/ https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe/ https://github.com/h3rald/hastyscribe https://github.com/h3rald/hastyscribe
ogogmad 3y ago
Is there a better UI for it than the usual one?
compumetrika 3y ago
I'm surprised to see no one has pointed out RMarkdown + RStudio[1] as one simple, low-effort way interface with Pandoc using an IDE you may already use. I used to write papers and slides in LaTeX (using vim, because who needs render previews), then eventually switched to Pandoc (also vim). I eventually discovered RMarkdown+RStudio. I was looking for a nice way to format a simple table and discovered that rmarkdown had nice extensions of basic markdown (this was many years ago so maybe that is incorporated into vanilla markdown/pandoc). The RMarkdown page claims: > R Markdown supports dozens of static and dynamic output formats including HTML, PDF, MS Word, Beamer, HTML5 slides, Tufte-style handouts, books, dashboards, shiny applications, scientific articles, websites, and more. ...which I think is largely due to using pandoc as the core generator. RStudio shows you the pandoc command it runs to generate your document, which I've used to figure out the pandoc command I want to run when I've switched to using pandoc directly. This is a bit of a "lazy" way to interact with pandoc. Maybe the "laziest" aspect: when I get a new computer, I can install the entire stack by installing Rstudio, then opening a new rmarkdown document. Rstudio asks whether I'd like to install all the necessary libraries -- click "yes" and that's it. Maybe that sounds silly but it used to be a lot of work to manage your LaTeX install. These days I greatly favor things that save me time, which seems to get more precious every year. [1] https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com
andrewp123 3y ago
It would be funny if one of the arrows in the visual on the side were missing. “Sorry, you can’t convert that.”
jackhalford 3y ago
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 3y ago
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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_MacFarlane_(philosopher...
- uhoh-itsmaciek 3y ago
  And a damn fine bluegrass fiddler [0]! [0]: https://www.whiskeybrothers.net/wb_bios.html https://www.whiskeybrothers.net/wb_bios.html
- Mikhail_K 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - johnday 3y ago
    > 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 3y ago
      [flagged]
llm_nerd 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Why do you use the docker image instead of just the normal executable?
  - michaelcampbell 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      What distro doesn't have pandoc in its package manager?
      - michaelcampbell 3y ago
        I was speaking more generally, not pandoc in particular. But even with packages in a manager, there have been times where different packages conflict on different dependencies that when packaged up in a well written docker image (which not all are) would have obviated. As a developer I see this more with programming languages than other things, and this very thing is what led to language "package management systems" like rbenv, sdkman, asdf, and the like.
  - 3y ago
kugurerdem 3y ago
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 https://www.arp242.net/email-wrapping.html [2]: https://github.com/kugurerdem/dotfiles/blob/2d68357273e1bc300017b6c59b6a03b31d4868c0/bin/unwrap-clipboard#L4 https://github.com/kugurerdem/dotfiles/blob/2d68357273e1bc30...
- ofou 3y ago
  I use it for writing my thesis, obviously it should be done in LATEX but I ended up using markdown + a yaml config file for some templates
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Interesting. And how do you send and read emails? Mutt?
  - kugurerdem 3y ago
    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.
spinningslate 3y ago
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/ https://quarto.org/ [1]: https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio/ https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio/
- banga 3y ago
  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/ https://codebraid.org/
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
      - 3y ago
snet0 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Me too :-) It was a steep learning curve but worth it. I used it 'within' VSC.
- airstrike 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  damn, I'll try that
- dillydogg 3y ago
  I do the same thing, except using org mode instead of markdown. I've really come to love org mode for writing.
  - hyperhopper 3y ago
    Org mode is amazing. The only problem with org mode is that more people/tools aren't using org mode.
macintux 3y ago
Worth noting that the author has also created a markup language, djot. https://github.com/jgm/djot https://github.com/jgm/djot
- dfc 3y ago
  Prof. MacFarlane is also one of the commonmark maintainers.
malloc-0x90 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.
sureglymop 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Well there's this: https://github.com/y-taka-23/wasm-pandoc https://github.com/y-taka-23/wasm-pandoc I tried it some time ago and it worked quite well
furiousteabag 3y ago
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/build.sh https://github.com/furiousteabag/asmirnov.xyz/blob/master/bu...
ilovefood 3y ago
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 https://github.com/KarimJedda/justslides
megamix 3y ago
Yes, I know.
on_the_train 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
    Which is actually quite a strong point for guis, amidst all their problems
    - meonkeys 3y ago
      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.
xinayder 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Arch Linux is linking dynamically, IIRC, and there it is 'only' 64 MiB: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/haskell-pandoc/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/haskell-pandoc/
    - algas 3y ago
      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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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/ https://learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/ [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook
bradley_taunt 3y ago
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/ https://pblog.btxx.org/
happyjack 3y ago
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 3y ago
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__ 3y ago
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__ 3y ago
  And by "Pandora" .... I mean pandoc, and that I hate typing on my phone
mapreduce 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Thanks! Didn't know Leanpub has its own markdown too. Yes I do want to keep everything local.
    - mooreds 3y ago
      Ah, then probably not a fit.
  - TehShrike 3y ago
    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-web-book-to-print-and-ebook/ https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/03/bringing-my-we... https://iangmcdowell.com/blog/posts/laying-out-a-book-with-css/ https://iangmcdowell.com/blog/posts/laying-out-a-book-with-c...
susam 3y ago
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.
- ufmace 3y ago
  Funny thing, while FFmpeg's CLI options aren't super intuitive, I do find it much easier to use than any GUI video editing or conversion program I've ever found. Those things can really write the book on byzantine user interfaces. At least Google or ChatGPT can usually give me fairly clear sets of options for FFmpeg that will do what I want.
  - mrehler 3y ago
    We got a new video system at a work that is a bit beyond my knowledge, but the files it puts out are very big (read the Apple ProRes whitepaper to figure out which option on this system would give us the smallest video files). I've owned Apple's Compressor on my own Mac for years now and never used it, and even it's a bit less intuitive than I'd like.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
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 https://www.jillesvangurp.com 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jillesvangurp https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jillesvangurp 3. https://github.com/jillesvangurp/www.jillesvangurp.com https://github.com/jillesvangurp/www.jillesvangurp.com
jjice 3y ago
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 3y ago
A few weeks ago I wrote a MediaWiki extension which uses it to convert documents to wiki articles https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PandocUltimateConverter https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PandocUltimateConvert...
hermitcrab 3y ago
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 3y ago
  (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 3y ago
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 https://git.sr.ht/~kb/open-notes/tree/main/item/.build.sh. So much simpler than pulling a universe of node modules.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
Pandoc is amazing. I think of it kind of like ffmpeg for text files...
- emeril 3y ago
  great analogy
johncole 3y ago
I love Pandoc. I wish the python library were a little more accessible.
darrenBaldwin03 3y ago
This is sick!
jovezhong 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
I see a Haskell project, I upvote.
emeril 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.
- themadturk 3y ago
  You are my hero.
lh4221 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
Here is the obligatory "Chat with Pandoc" - GPT https://chat.openai.com/g/g-YX1CmSAA9-franz-enzenhofer-pandoc-convert/ 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/9061
r-u-serious 3y ago
yes
gatane 3y ago
You can use Markdown with pandoc to make a pdf akin to the LaTex ones. For simple stuff, it was nice.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
Has anyone created a small, lite version of pandoc yet.
dredmorbius 3y ago
Quite honestly the most valuable tool I'd learned in the 2010s (having been a significant Unix / Linux user since the 1980s). In the late 1990s / early aughts, I'd written a toolchain to generate multiple document formats from a source based on HTML fragments. With Pandoc (and usually Markdown, occasionally LaTeX), I've discarded all of that, and have greater utility (more outputs, and FWIW, more input formats as well if I choose those).

824 points by swatson741 3y ago

Shameless plug: I built a static site generator with Pandoc and shell (with RSS support!). https://github.com/alxmrs/pandoc-website-template https://github.com/alxmrs/pandoc-website-template

ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago

Pandoc is amazing and immensely useful. Just in case you need something simpler, let me suggest Hastyscribe. Statically compiled cross-platform program for convertng markdown to self-contained portable HTML with a nice styling embedded by default. Simple, small, fast, hackable, written in Nim. https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe/ https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe/ https://github.com/h3rald/hastyscribe https://github.com/h3rald/hastyscribe

ogogmad 3y ago

Is there a better UI for it than the usual one?

compumetrika 3y ago

I'm surprised to see no one has pointed out RMarkdown + RStudio[1] as one simple, low-effort way interface with Pandoc using an IDE you may already use. I used to write papers and slides in LaTeX (using vim, because who needs render previews), then eventually switched to Pandoc (also vim). I eventually discovered RMarkdown+RStudio. I was looking for a nice way to format a simple table and discovered that rmarkdown had nice extensions of basic markdown (this was many years ago so maybe that is incorporated into vanilla markdown/pandoc). The RMarkdown page claims: > R Markdown supports dozens of static and dynamic output formats including HTML, PDF, MS Word, Beamer, HTML5 slides, Tufte-style handouts, books, dashboards, shiny applications, scientific articles, websites, and more. ...which I think is largely due to using pandoc as the core generator. RStudio shows you the pandoc command it runs to generate your document, which I've used to figure out the pandoc command I want to run when I've switched to using pandoc directly. This is a bit of a "lazy" way to interact with pandoc. Maybe the "laziest" aspect: when I get a new computer, I can install the entire stack by installing Rstudio, then opening a new rmarkdown document. Rstudio asks whether I'd like to install all the necessary libraries -- click "yes" and that's it. Maybe that sounds silly but it used to be a lot of work to manage your LaTeX install. These days I greatly favor things that save me time, which seems to get more precious every year. [1] https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com

andrewp123 3y ago

It would be funny if one of the arrows in the visual on the side were missing. “Sorry, you can’t convert that.”

jackhalford 3y ago

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 3y ago

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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_MacFarlane_(philosopher...

uhoh-itsmaciek 3y ago
And a damn fine bluegrass fiddler [0]! [0]: https://www.whiskeybrothers.net/wb_bios.html https://www.whiskeybrothers.net/wb_bios.html
Mikhail_K 3y ago
[flagged]
- johnday 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    [flagged]

llm_nerd 3y ago

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 3y ago
Why do you use the docker image instead of just the normal executable?
- michaelcampbell 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    What distro doesn't have pandoc in its package manager?
    - michaelcampbell 3y ago
      I was speaking more generally, not pandoc in particular. But even with packages in a manager, there have been times where different packages conflict on different dependencies that when packaged up in a well written docker image (which not all are) would have obviated. As a developer I see this more with programming languages than other things, and this very thing is what led to language "package management systems" like rbenv, sdkman, asdf, and the like.
- 3y ago

kugurerdem 3y ago

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 https://www.arp242.net/email-wrapping.html [2]: https://github.com/kugurerdem/dotfiles/blob/2d68357273e1bc300017b6c59b6a03b31d4868c0/bin/unwrap-clipboard#L4 https://github.com/kugurerdem/dotfiles/blob/2d68357273e1bc30...

ofou 3y ago
I use it for writing my thesis, obviously it should be done in LATEX but I ended up using markdown + a yaml config file for some templates
tambourine_man 3y ago
Interesting. And how do you send and read emails? Mutt?
- kugurerdem 3y ago
  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.

spinningslate 3y ago

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/ https://quarto.org/ [1]: https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio/ https://posit.co/products/open-source/rstudio/

banga 3y ago
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/ https://codebraid.org/
- nerdponx 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    - 3y ago

snet0 3y ago

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 3y ago
Me too :-) It was a steep learning curve but worth it. I used it 'within' VSC.
airstrike 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
damn, I'll try that
dillydogg 3y ago
I do the same thing, except using org mode instead of markdown. I've really come to love org mode for writing.
- hyperhopper 3y ago
  Org mode is amazing. The only problem with org mode is that more people/tools aren't using org mode.

macintux 3y ago

Worth noting that the author has also created a markup language, djot. https://github.com/jgm/djot https://github.com/jgm/djot

dfc 3y ago
Prof. MacFarlane is also one of the commonmark maintainers.

malloc-0x90 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.

sureglymop 3y ago

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 3y ago
Well there's this: https://github.com/y-taka-23/wasm-pandoc https://github.com/y-taka-23/wasm-pandoc I tried it some time ago and it worked quite well

furiousteabag 3y ago

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/build.sh https://github.com/furiousteabag/asmirnov.xyz/blob/master/bu...

ilovefood 3y ago

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 https://github.com/KarimJedda/justslides

megamix 3y ago

Yes, I know.

on_the_train 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  Which is actually quite a strong point for guis, amidst all their problems
  - meonkeys 3y ago
    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.

xinayder 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Arch Linux is linking dynamically, IIRC, and there it is 'only' 64 MiB: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/haskell-pandoc/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/haskell-pandoc/
  - algas 3y ago
    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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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/ https://learnbyexample.github.io/customizing-pandoc/ [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook

bradley_taunt 3y ago

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/ https://pblog.btxx.org/

happyjack 3y ago

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 3y ago

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__ 3y ago

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__ 3y ago
And by "Pandora" .... I mean pandoc, and that I hate typing on my phone

mapreduce 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Thanks! Didn't know Leanpub has its own markdown too. Yes I do want to keep everything local.
  - mooreds 3y ago
    Ah, then probably not a fit.
- TehShrike 3y ago
  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-web-book-to-print-and-ebook/ https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2014/11/03/bringing-my-we... https://iangmcdowell.com/blog/posts/laying-out-a-book-with-css/ https://iangmcdowell.com/blog/posts/laying-out-a-book-with-c...

susam 3y ago

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.

ufmace 3y ago
Funny thing, while FFmpeg's CLI options aren't super intuitive, I do find it much easier to use than any GUI video editing or conversion program I've ever found. Those things can really write the book on byzantine user interfaces. At least Google or ChatGPT can usually give me fairly clear sets of options for FFmpeg that will do what I want.
- mrehler 3y ago
  We got a new video system at a work that is a bit beyond my knowledge, but the files it puts out are very big (read the Apple ProRes whitepaper to figure out which option on this system would give us the smallest video files). I've owned Apple's Compressor on my own Mac for years now and never used it, and even it's a bit less intuitive than I'd like.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

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 https://www.jillesvangurp.com 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jillesvangurp https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jillesvangurp 3. https://github.com/jillesvangurp/www.jillesvangurp.com https://github.com/jillesvangurp/www.jillesvangurp.com

jjice 3y ago

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 3y ago

A few weeks ago I wrote a MediaWiki extension which uses it to convert documents to wiki articles https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PandocUltimateConverter https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PandocUltimateConvert...

hermitcrab 3y ago

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 3y ago
(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 3y ago

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 https://git.sr.ht/~kb/open-notes/tree/main/item/.build.sh. So much simpler than pulling a universe of node modules.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

Pandoc is amazing. I think of it kind of like ffmpeg for text files...

emeril 3y ago
great analogy

johncole 3y ago

I love Pandoc. I wish the python library were a little more accessible.

darrenBaldwin03 3y ago

This is sick!

jovezhong 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

I see a Haskell project, I upvote.

emeril 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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.

themadturk 3y ago
You are my hero.

lh4221 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

Here is the obligatory "Chat with Pandoc" - GPT https://chat.openai.com/g/g-YX1CmSAA9-franz-enzenhofer-pandoc-convert/ 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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/9061

r-u-serious 3y ago

yes

gatane 3y ago

You can use Markdown with pandoc to make a pdf akin to the LaTex ones. For simple stuff, it was nice.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

Has anyone created a small, lite version of pandoc yet.

dredmorbius 3y ago

Quite honestly the most valuable tool I'd learned in the 2010s (having been a significant Unix / Linux user since the 1980s). In the late 1990s / early aughts, I'd written a toolchain to generate multiple document formats from a source based on HTML fragments. With Pandoc (and usually Markdown, occasionally LaTeX), I've discarded all of that, and have greater utility (more outputs, and FWIW, more input formats as well if I choose those).