5 ms·
Pandoc Templates
- raffael_de 5mo ago2 hours, 56 points and not a single comment?
- RadiozRadioz 5mo agoPerhaps people are quasi-bookmarking it
- ktzar 5mo agoPandoc is such an amazing piece of software. I used it to format my novel and made it part of a GitHub action to produce all the formats I required. I wasn't aware of templates, but some look really sleek. I keep thinking that modern text editors are just flawed and markdown, with all its downsides and limitations, is what 99% is the people need.
- maxerickson 5mo agoFor the short, simple documents that most people make, a versioned, wysiwyg word processor is going to beat everything else. I mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.
- limagnolia 5mo agoFor most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.
- maxerickson 5mo agoRight, most people don't want to do that, they want the burden of applying styles to the couple headings or whatever. Unfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.
- sgc 5mo agoAgreed. There is actually a lot better control in openoffice / libreoffice than most people know. You just have to set up your styles and be systematic about (virtually) never using direct formatting, instead always applying a pre-configured style. There is a distinct value in seeing your final product as you work, when the final product is visual.
- JW_00000 5mo agoThis is what Word is to most people. They just use the default styles, or their company's template. No special formatting, styling etc. Also if you do want to add a table or a figure, for most people Word will be much easier than doing the same in Markdown.
- xorcist 5mo agoHaving handled Word documents a few times in my years, oh, how I wish this was true.
- troyvit 5mo agoBuilding my resume in a wysiwyg editor was an exercise in frustration. Formatting was inconsistent, they were only searchable from inside the editor and versioning was useless because diff had no meaning. My markdown resume has its own problems but having this level of control has been a huge load off my mind.
- macintux 5mo agoI started maintaining mine in plain text, no markup at all, 20 years ago and try to use it wherever I can. My favorite employer, a startup, liked it. Regrettably most companies these days lack a sense of humor.
- kzrdude 5mo agoI'm a programmer and even I like writing in a non-programmable environment. Programming in the document system just stimulates the more primitive parts of my brain that love the processing and programming more than the writing itself. So it's distracting in that way.
- tikhonj 5mo agoWYSIWYG pretty consistently leads to visual and structural messes. It's only going to "beat" everything else if you don't care about quality. Most people don't—and don't have to—care about quality for their short, simple documents, but that is neither good nor inevitable, and it's always worth trying to do better.
- abyssin 5mo agoYou may be overestimating technical abilities of 99% of the people. I tried to convert some to pandoc and failed miserably. Personally I love it, markdown is becoming more and more central to my workflows.
- adamddev1 5mo agoHaskell thriving in the wild!
- noosphr 5mo agoYou should be aware that pandoc markdown has extensive non-standard additions to the language to make it usable. If you want a pure markup language that is simple, plain text readable and able to produce text more complex than what a type writer could manage in 1920 then restructured text is the way to go.
- applicative 5mo agopandoc has infinitely many devices for including various commands. A lua filter - to take one standard example - can manage basically anything you cook up. The going AIs can write them for you and your triggering syntax at the drop of a hat. Inter alia, you can write your restructured text in markdown and include bits like this. Here is normal Pandoc Markdown text. ```{=rst} .. note:: This is a native reStructuredText directive! Pandoc will not parse or change this text. It goes straight to the rST output writer. ``` Back to normal Markdown text.
- thibaut_barrere 5mo agoSomehow related is https://www.metanorma.org/ https://www.metanorma.org/ (using Markdown to produce norms-compatible outputs).
- submeta 5mo agoI am a heavy user of Pandoc. As I write all my text in markdown using Obsidian, but have to create content for the MS Office environment, I use Pandoc to convert my markdown content into ms office formated content. I would be lost had I have to use the Office tools to edit and format my text. So thank you to all the maintainers of Pandoc.
- ltrg 5mo agoI used it to output my doctoral thesis in LaTeX from Markdown 10 years ago, and similarly for going back and forth between my supervisor's Word documents and the main thesis text. Embarrassingly, a horrible little script for converting Pandoc's Markdown endnotes to inline format remains my most-starred GitHub repo: https://github.com/ltrgoddard/inliner/ https://github.com/ltrgoddard/inliner/
- mkovach 5mo ago[dead]
- maxerickson 5mo agoBasic familiarity with the paragraph styles in Word is like a 20 minute task. If you are using markdown, you already understand the conceptual basis for it, so you just need to understand how it's implemented over there. I'm not arguing that it is something you should do, just rolling my eyes at "I would be lost".
- submeta 5mo agoNot lost because it's hard to learn, but because I don't like writing in ms office products. It's not just word, I write formated long emails in outlook as well.
- ntnsndr 5mo agoI have been relying on pandoc for many years and had no idea I could use templates like this, which I suppose is pathetic but also indicates just how powerful the defaults are on their own.
- djyde 5mo agoI've always wanted to make a GUI client for pandoc
- falsaberN1 5mo agoOh wow, I use Pandoc fairly extensively, and have my own templates, and I never knew you could make things as colorful as some of these. Oh no, inspiration has arrived. Guess I know what I'm wasting my weekend into, hah. Also this page seems to have existed for a while and I never heard of it! I'm glad I stumbled upon this. A lot of nice ideas here.
- chlaunchla 5mo agoPandoc is an impressive piece of software but I could never quite get PDF generation working nicely with it. Table layouts were often broken, with text overlapping into adjacent fields. Unicode font fallback didn't work properly, with characters like "→" being silently dropped because they didn't exist in the main font. Having predictable control of page breaks, to avoid situations where header text didn't stick to the following paragraph and instead had header and paragraph text split over a page boundary, was pretty much impossible. I ended up concluding that Markdown isn't a sufficiently powerful markup language for page-based documents, and went back to using Word in all its WYSIWYG delight. That said, maybe there were ways of doing all of the above but I couldn't figure it out and found the whole process of wrestling with with both Markdown and LaTeX templates, and Pandoc configuration, unintuitive and annoying.
- cwmoore 5mo agoI broke out a little HTML/CSS for this with page-break: after, now deprecated but the improved directives look better: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1664049/can-i-force-a-page-break-in-html-printing https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1664049/can-i-force-a-pa...
- thibaut_barrere 5mo agoTo address that, a long while back I used a Markdown to Ruby Prawn to PDF generator. I could not find a generic mainstream tool supporting this…
- Ametrin 5mo ago[flagged]
- __mharrison__ 5mo agoUse Pandoc w/ Typst. I've published many books using it. In fact, just had a friend with a traditionally published book who is now self-pubbing ask me yesterday about my tools. I recommended Pandoc and Typst. He (surprisingly to me) had never heard of Typst, but within the hour replied that (with the use of AI) he had a great-looking template for the book. (Try doing that with LaTeX).
- wodenokoto 5mo agoI’ve been looking for a template to use for fancy business reports, so I can do my stuff in R/Python/QMD and management can get something colorful to look at without me having to copy paste everything into PowerPoint
- kergonath 5mo agoYou might find Quarto ( https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/ ) interesting. It sounds like it does what you want.
- abyssin 5mo agotypst templates would be a great addition to these.
- FailMore 5mo agoI’ve been building something somewhat adjacent to this. It’s https://sdocs.dev https://sdocs.dev. It’s as 100% private browser based Markdown renderer
- malteg 5mo agohttps://typst.app/ https://typst.app/
- ifh-hn 5mo agoIsn't this a paid for app?
- trostaft 5mo agoThe upper tier features on the webapp are paid, but the local tools are all free. That includes local editor support. IIRC the compiler is apache 2.
- singpolyma3 5mo agoYou against paying for things?
- ifh-hn 5mo agoThat's your takeaway from my question?
- isatty 5mo agoYeah idk about all the typst HN shilling. Latex works great and is as free as it can get.
- maleldil 5mo agoYou can use Typst 100% for free, just like LaTeX. There's a CLI for compilation, there's an LSP, code formatter, etc. Complaining that the web app has a paid tier is like complaining that Overleaf is paid. As for why people shill Typst over LaTeX, it's just a better overall experience. Things that are annoying in LaTeX are easy in Typst. I've written plenty of LaTeX for academic papers and my Master's dissertation, but I'm now writing my PhD thesis in Typst. It's so much better. The only barrier to using it everywhere is that my colleagues still prefer to use Overleaf for collaboration, which forces me to use LaTeX for papers.
- ifh-hn 5mo agoI used to use pandoc for my bachelors papers, which needed to be submitted as word documents. I never used templates but had a rather large "one-liner" pandoc command to convert my markdown files. At the time I'd not got round to understanding the yaml front matter etc. I even user Zettlr for a while [0]. I then discovered quarto [1] and this changed everything. Much nicer experience. I used this for my masters papers. I think the tooling around pandoc is what makes it such a good tool. I remember attempting restructured text and latex and having a right hard time. [0] https://zettlr.com/ https://zettlr.com/ [1] https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/
- thibaut_barrere 5mo agoNeat. Now I need Quarto, but with Elixir and Livebook!
- apwheele 5mo agoI have my crazy notes on Quarto and word documents here, https://github.com/apwheele/Blog_Code/tree/master/Quarto/ReportTemplate https://github.com/apwheele/Blog_Code/tree/master/Quarto/Rep.... Hopefully useful for others reading these comments. I don't even know what magic buttons I need to push to get that template to correctly inherit the table format I wanted from pandoc, but it does. I tend to have other scripts though for more complicated tables though. So if I want a table to have a certain row highlighted a different color, I would write a Powershell script to run after the table was generated. I was never able to figure out how to use LibreOffice to insert the table of contents and then export to PDF (although I can do it via the GUI).
- Loic 5mo agopandoc is my "document converter" go-to tool. Quarto is my documentation tool. For me, they are both massively used, but cover different usages.
- ckarpati 5mo agoPandoc templates need an update for better logical operators. The supported yaml and conditionals are poor for even light use cases.
- NK_MAK 5mo agoPandoc can be a bit painful to set up, but once it’s in your workflow, it’s hard to replace. Especially when you care about repeatable formatting and multiple outputs.
- galaxyLogic 5mo agoLooks very nice but still takes some effort to undertsand how to use it. Isn't it simpler to ask the AI to create the PDFs for you?
- IamCompliant 5mo ago[flagged]
- jt_park 5mo ago[dead]
- quijoteuniv 5mo agoEisvogel template is a fantastic way to use Latex without knowing much about it, by transforming your markdown with Pandoc, mind you i used it before LLMs existed, but it was great to turn the notes of a project of a tesis into a super pro formated version without learning Latex.
- mrichman 5mo agoI have been using Typst exclusively for a year. I've commercially published with it, no issues.
- globnomulous 5mo agoI am stunned by the beauty of these. The Tufte template is particularly unexpected and lovely
- wowczarek 5mo agoTo me, Pandoc is "never have to touch Word again", in other _words_, salvation. Sadly, the .docx templates aren't enough - they have the styling, but for those forced to produce a .docx output as a necessity for "corporate" consumption - you will find it that it's not quite straightforward to insert a title page, and out of the reference docx file, only the styles are used, not the content. You can define headers and footers in the reference file, but not more than that. As of 3.2.1, Pandoc supports OpenXML template files for its docx writer as well as pre and post body insertion: --template, --include-before-body and --include-after-body, but if you prefer to define your title page in Word, or haven't gotten your head around doing an OpenXML thing like me, I found this Windows tool: https://github.com/jamessantiago/DocxMerge https://github.com/jamessantiago/DocxMerge You can define your title page in one docx file and then merge it with Pandoc's output. But since styles from both get merged, it's best to start your title page with a copy of your reference and/or delete as many styles as possible from your title page so you don't have to make changes to both. There are also some other quirks like fitting tables to contents properly in docx - a workaround is a PowerShell script (shock, horror), that opens the file, iterates over tables, sets autofit and saves the document. Doing "Werd" right: edit markdown, type "make". -> docx, pdf. The world is a good place sometimes.