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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#71

Post by airstrike »

snet0 wrote: post #7

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.

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

Re: Pandoc

#72

Post by kugurerdem »

whateveracct wrote: post #63
weinzierl wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is one of the most useful programs I use and the only useful program I ever used that was written in Haskell.

> only useful program I ever used that was written in Haskell Never used Shellcheck?

Whoa, I use Shellcheck a lot and did not even know it was written in Haskell.

Re: Pandoc

#73

Post by mapreduce »

babel_ wrote: post #69
mapreduce wrote: post #46

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 so…

Personally, whatever helps with the specific writing part of it all the most is what's best. If you find writing in a given dialect of Markdown or LaTeX or Org-mode is easiest, do that. For me, that's Markdown with embedded LaTeX, for others it's Org-mode, or RST, and so on. Pandoc handles these fairly seamlessly, and with many options for PDF engines, though I'd say it has a preference for LaTeX and HTML in the back…

> If you find writing in a given dialect of Markdown or LaTeX or Org-mode is easiest, do that.

I find Org-mode the easiest but like I said in my comment, the conversion quality is not great. Pandoc breaks a lot of stuff in Org-mode in edge cases. One example I shared in my comment was Pandoc breaking internal links.

So by selecting something I find the easiest I have burned many hours of troubleshooting figuring out why the output does not look right.

That's why I want to draw upon the wisdom of the community here to find out which input format works best and by best I mean flawlessly. No edge case issues. No rendering flaws. If I get the specific recommendations, I'll try them out for sometime and then commit myself to it instead of burning more time trialling all of the different input formats.

Re: Pandoc

#74

Post by thworp »

2cynykyl wrote: post #57
andy99 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll probably lose some nerd cred: I do most of my writing in MS word, I find it easier to cut and paste and add footnotes and section headers. And then I use Pandoc to convert the docx into the format I want, usually HTML*. I used to do markdown in vim but I found that for most of what I do I prefer word. I do write code in vim... * I use this css file when converting: https://gist.github.com/killercup/5917178

I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type…

For me personally it's the reverse. After 15 years of writing almost exclusively with vim (or vim-like) input scheme using anything else would really break my flow. Can you even do something like ct, (delete everything between current cursor and next comma, then start insert mode) in word? Even if you could, it would be some 5-key monstrosity which makes you move from home row.

Now granted, if you're just hammering out words without any editing this doesn't matter, but I think almost every piece of good writing has had 3+ revisions.

Of course this is a personal preference, but my friends who do a lot of writing (and never used vim at all) still seem to prefer a distraction-free editor with a lot less features and a much less noisy UI for the actual writing.

Re: Pandoc

#75

Post by michaelrpeskin »

2cynykyl wrote: post #57
andy99 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll probably lose some nerd cred: I do most of my writing in MS word, I find it easier to cut and paste and add footnotes and section headers. And then I use Pandoc to convert the docx into the format I want, usually HTML*. I used to do markdown in vim but I found that for most of what I do I prefer word. I do write code in vim... * I use this css file when converting: https://gist.github.com/killercup/5917178

I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type…

I agree with your premise of "don't be distracted" when writing, but for me Word often is the distraction. I use a live-preview markdown editor (e.g., Typora, MarkText) to let me get my thoughts onto paper (screen) with low friction. It's easier to just hit "#" rather than drag the mouse to the style bar and select heading. Or more importantly for me, it's so much easier to hit "$" and seamlessly go into LaTeX for math than it is to open the equation editor and start selecting all the template objects.

When it's time to collaborate, I use Pandoc to turn it into docx and then I send it around and the final formatting happens in Word because that's the easiest for everyone to work with, but the "get the ideas down" phase works best for me in a more "minimal" editor with little formatting.

I love the idea of Quarto, and if I had that when I was in grad school, it would have made my life so much easier. The workflow I see for Quarto is that you can write your paper while you're doing the experimentation because the code is embedded with your thoughts. But in that case, you're mostly slowed down by the research process so it can be a little more clunky to get the writing done because you have time and you're iterating over ideas more than words in that phase. I'd use it now for work in the R&D phase, but I know I won't have a critical mass of collaborators to make it worth while.

Re: Pandoc

#76

Post by ParetoOptimal »

andy99 wrote: post #35
kugurerdem wrote: post #5

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]…

I'll probably lose some nerd cred: I do most of my writing in MS word, I find it easier to cut and paste and add footnotes and section headers. And then I use Pandoc to convert the docx into the format I want, usually HTML*. I used to do markdown in vim but I found that for most of what I do I prefer word. I do write code in vim... * I use this css file when converting: https://gist.github.com/killercup/5917178

You might find it interesting that I never read any docx sent to me and instead run it through pandoc to convert it to markdown first.

Re: Pandoc

#77

Post by Diti »

mapreduce wrote: post #46

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 so…

Is there any reason for why you’re not considering AsciiDoc?

Re: Pandoc

#78

Post by troupe »

mapreduce wrote: post #46

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 so…

What snet0 suggested might be your best bet. You can use pandoc markdown but then slip into LaTex if you need to do something more complicated.

Re: Pandoc

#79

Post by subtra3t »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #67
2cynykyl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type…

Most tech people who use Word know how to use it and that is exactly the problem. We don't have the benefit of ignorance. We send off drafts to someone for commenting or editing and get an inconsistently formatted mess back because others don't even know that styles exist and use manual / direct formatting instead. We are the ones that have to suffer because people we are forced to collaborate with do not take 5 minu…

So what you're saying is that the problem with Word is that it makes it easy to write unpolished and unprofessional documents? In your opinion, is that the fault of the word processor or the user? [0]

[0]: Not a rhetoric question that implies one answer to be the only "right" one.

Re: Pandoc

#80

Post by tombert »

2cynykyl wrote: post #57
andy99 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll probably lose some nerd cred: I do most of my writing in MS word, I find it easier to cut and paste and add footnotes and section headers. And then I use Pandoc to convert the docx into the format I want, usually HTML*. I used to do markdown in vim but I found that for most of what I do I prefer word. I do write code in vim... * I use this css file when converting: https://gist.github.com/killercup/5917178

I also use Word for all my writing too, so wanted to defend you. People (tech people at least) have lost sight of the fact that writing should happen in "word processing software", and Word is the best-in-class. To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process. Jack Kerouac used to type…

Part of the reason I stopped using Word was that I absolutely abhorred 2007-and-beyond’s equation editor. I was using previous versions of Word with Mathtype for my math homework, but I found the new equation editor really hard to use. Around the same time I had coincidentally to Linux, and OpenOffice has an even worse equation editor.

Pandoc was a game changer for me. I picked up LaTeX equation editor pretty quick, and being able to write markdown was so much more pleasant in my mind.

It’s not perfect; tables are a pain still, but I have no desire to go back to Word.

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