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I second this. Pandoc is up there as one of the most useful tools that exist, that almost no one talks about. It's amazing, easy to use, and works. I regularly

I second this. Pandoc is up there as one of the most useful tools that exist, that almost no one talks about. It's amazing, easy to use, and works. I regularly see new tools in the space pop-up, but someone would have to have a REALLY unique and compelling feature, or highly optimized use case to get me to use anything else (besides Pandoc).

thangalin 2y ago
I wrote a series of blog posts about typesetting Markdown using pandoc: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog Eventually, I found pandoc to be a little limiting: * Awkward to use interpolated variables within prose. * No real-time preview prior to rendering the final document. * Limited options for TeX support (e.g., SVG vs. inline; ConTeXt vs. LaTeX). * Inconsistent syntax for captions and cross-references. * Requires glue to apply a single YAML metadata source file to multiple documents (e.g., book chapters). * Does not (reliably) convert straight quotes to curly quotes. For my purposes, I wanted to convert variable-laden Markdown and R Markdown to text, XHTML, and PDF formats. Eventually I replaced my tool chain of yamlp + pandoc + knitr by writing an integrated FOSS cross-platform desktop editor. https://keenwrite.com/ https://keenwrite.com/ KeenWrite uses flexmark-java + Renjin + KeenTeX + KeenQuotes to provide a solution that can replace pandoc + knitr in some situations. Note how the captions and cross-reference syntax for images, tables, and equations is unified to use a double-colon sigil: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/references.md https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/ref... There's also command-line usage for integrating into build pipelines: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/cmd.md https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/cmd...

thangalin 2y ago

I wrote a series of blog posts about typesetting Markdown using pandoc: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog Eventually, I found pandoc to be a little limiting: * Awkward to use interpolated variables within prose. * No real-time preview prior to rendering the final document. * Limited options for TeX support (e.g., SVG vs. inline; ConTeXt vs. LaTeX). * Inconsistent syntax for captions and cross-references. * Requires glue to apply a single YAML metadata source file to multiple documents (e.g., book chapters). * Does not (reliably) convert straight quotes to curly quotes. For my purposes, I wanted to convert variable-laden Markdown and R Markdown to text, XHTML, and PDF formats. Eventually I replaced my tool chain of yamlp + pandoc + knitr by writing an integrated FOSS cross-platform desktop editor. https://keenwrite.com/ https://keenwrite.com/ KeenWrite uses flexmark-java + Renjin + KeenTeX + KeenQuotes to provide a solution that can replace pandoc + knitr in some situations. Note how the captions and cross-reference syntax for images, tables, and equations is unified to use a double-colon sigil: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/references.md https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/ref... There's also command-line usage for integrating into build pipelines: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/cmd.md https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/cmd...