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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#131

Post by Vegenoid »

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…

If you want to use Word, then that's great, but when you start saying what other people 'should' be doing then they're going to speak up.

> writing should happen in "word processing software"

Writing should happen where you are comfortable editing text. I am comfortable in same editor where I write code.

> 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.

To all the people who say "Writing markup in an IDE sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use it properly". I can write in a flow and apply/change formatting easily. I can jump around and rearrange documents with ease. And it is in a format that can be opened and read by native software on almost any computer.

If you think that Jack Kerouac would prefer MS Word over a much simpler plain text editor, I don't agree.

Re: Pandoc

#132

Post by 2cynykyl »

stakhanov wrote: post #85
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…

> slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing It's a bit of a matter of perspective. The distinction between looking at a document in markdown versus Word is a bit analogous to the distinction between looking at a movie in its textual form as a screenplay versus looking at a movie as a piece of video: Text is capable of abstraction in a way that video is not. In the screenplay, it might say "table", but wh…

I know you're just font as an example, but doesn't your markdown editor also shove a font in your face? You can adjust default behavior in Word just as well as in another editor.

Anyway, to work within your analogy, I would say that Word lets the write do a bit of a 'mockup' of the set with nearly 0 effort. Like "I want a table here", so 2-3 clicks and you have it. Then you can "let the director" take your mock up and flesh it out properly later. As a writing, it helps me to see the mock up of the product as a go, but I want that mock up to be effortless. And as I said above, I do some work up front to make sure that Word's mock up looks good (or good enough).

Re: Pandoc

#133

Post by Mikhail_K »

johnday wrote: post #118
Mikhail_K wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 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 typ…

[flagged]

Re: Pandoc

#134

Post by mapreduce »

Diti wrote: post #77
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?

No such reason. I'm willing to try out AsciiDoc.

I mean I did not try AsciiDoc until now because there are so many choices of input formats and the ones I've tried so far have been disappointing one way or the other.

I talked about Org-mode rendering broken in edge cases. Same with Latex too. I see Pandoc has first-class support for its own Pandoc Markdown format. But the support for all other input formats seem patchy.

If you think Pandoc has good support for AsciiDoc without any edge case issues, I'll be most certainly trying it out.

Re: Pandoc

#135

Post by mapreduce »

babel_ wrote: post #87
mapreduce wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Unfortunately, the perfect is very much the enemy of the good here. Aside from HTML, I'm afraid that PDF and EPUB are very much driven by purpose-built tools designed to show interactively what it will look like as output. This means that they've both delved into a depth of subtle semantic differences that makes flawless output an extremely difficult task. Of course, practically, pandoc can resolve the vast majority…

Great comment! Thanks for engaging in this discussion and offering some good perspective about my Pandoc issues. Really appreciate it!

Re: Pandoc

#136

Post by queuebert »

GrumpySloth wrote: post #70
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…

> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Or maybe those people just have eyes which can spot the differences in spacing between documents created with different Word versions, the mediocre kerning, and a multitude of other typographical annoyances. Even a website is easier to replicate exactly in another browser than a Word document to be replicated from scratch…

Yes, anyone who's ever learned LaTeX and why it was invented immediately sees how absolutely awful Word is at its rendering. Funny that a trillion-dollar company can't seem to figure out a better algorithm than Donald Knuth mocked up in Pascal decades ago.

I think of this as another version of enshittification -- the acceptance of poor performance as the "standard".

And don't get me started on math equations in Word ...

Re: Pandoc

#137

Post by mekster »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #24
SushiHippie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you use the docker image instead of just the normal executable?

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 vers…

What distro doesn't have pandoc in its package manager?

Re: Pandoc

#138

Post by Duanemclemore »

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.

Re: Pandoc

#139

Post by queuebert »

ravi-delia wrote: post #55
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

You know what, that's a sufficiently cursed workflow that it wraps back around to adding nerd cred

Like using a hex editor to build up a Word doc?
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