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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#151

Post by kugurerdem »

pxeger1 wrote: post #119
kugurerdem wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice point! I agree that it's a bloated method, however, this was the best solution I could come up with at that point of time. I am certain that there are better solutions, it's just me who could not find it. I went with this solution anyways since it was still an improvement compared to my previous method in vim which involved setting the text width to a large number like 9999, highlighting the text I wanted to unw…

My solution would be to go to the start of each paragraph and hold J (shift + j) until the entire paragraph was joined onto one line, and then go down to the next one. I guess it depends on how long your emails are but this is pretty quick.

My problem with this method is that it's not convenient especially when there are lots of paragraphs. When you highlight all the paragraphs and press shift J, it unwraps everything into a single line. This results different paragraphs ending up on the same line. You also need to undo the changes you made to avoid disturbing the original file content.

Re: Pandoc

#152

Post by kccqzy »

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…

If you are committed to using Pandoc to generate the three formats then I don't see why you can't commit to Pandoc's flavor of markdown.

Re: Pandoc

#153

Post by _Algernon_ »

enriquto wrote: post #146
_Algernon_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It is the equivalent of seeing somebody use right-click to copy-paste What would you prefer, instead? CTRL-C, CTRL-V? SHIFT-INS, CTRL-INS? some vim incantation? As a select-to-copy/middle-click-to-paste guy, seeing people use these inferior alternatives looks extremely annoying to me.

I think that depends if your workflow is oriented around the keyboard or the mouse. For me it is keyboard oriented and I frequently use (Ctrl)+Shift+Arrows for finegrained selection anyways so Ctrl+C/V is most convenient. I also use Vimium in my browser. If my workflow was mouse oriented I'd instead use Gesturefy.

I think they're equivalent and certainly both are better than using the right-click menu.

Re: Pandoc

#154

Post by mooreds »

TehShrike wrote: post #105
mooreds wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-we... https://iangmcdowell.com/blog/posts/laying-out-a-book-with-c..…

For leanpub, I started using it for the layout. And kept using it for the marketing.

That's one thing I learned, having written a couple of books. Even though writing is tough, it is easier in many wyas than the marketing.

Re: Pandoc

#155

Post by weebull »

2cynykyl wrote: post #126
_Algernon_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good point, sigh...this is so true. I have created a 45 minute tutorial of 'how to use word properly' to address this exact pain point. I send a link to my students if their first draft commits any 'sins'. BTW, when I said tech people, I was thinking mostly about the computer savvy academics who use Latex for everything.

People use things like LaTeX exactly because of this problem. Word processing software brought the problem of inconsistent formatting and layout within the grasp of everyone and boy! ...did they grab it with both hands. Systems based on plain text allow the author to concentrate on content only, without the need to format.

Personally I find LaTeX misses the mark. Too much markup is needed and it detracts. I'm a fan of asciidoc though. I just wish the templating was a little better though.

Re: Pandoc

#156

Post by bluGill »

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…

There is not a good answer. Markdown is a poor format and there are a number of almost compatible variations. However Markdown in all formats is somewhat limited and so there will be some things you cannot do that if you work on a complex project you will want to work on.

However markdown - if you stick with the subset that everyone supports is the most widely supported alternative. If you go with a specific markdown you lose support for something else you might want. If you go for non-markdown you will lose support for most of the world.

I personally selected restructured text which is really powerful for the complex documentation I'm trying to create. However I keep running into nothing else supports it problems (I can extract doxygen from C++ - but only with tools that don't support the latest. I haven't figured out what to do about Rust documentation)

Re: Pandoc

#157

Post by hadley »

nerdponx wrote: post #50
banga wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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.

Is there some way we could advertise this better? The quarto homepage already says “Quarto is a multi-language, next generation version of R Markdown from Posit, with many new new features and capabilities.”

When talking about Quarto within the R community we usually frame it this way, but obviously it’s not a very useful description if you’ve never heard of RMarkdown.

Re: Pandoc

#158

Post by w10-1 »

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.

Re: Pandoc

#159

Post by tombert »

2cynykyl wrote: post #129
tombert wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You are probably the only person I've heard that liked the old mathtype editor :-) The new editor is terrific because you can use just type the equation in latex format (e.g. A_c = \pi R^2 ). Then you hit the space bar and it converts to wysiwyg style. Most of my equations are on the simpler side I guess.

I didn't know about being able to type the LaTeX stuff; that's pretty neat.

I think part of it was that I had basically memorized all the keystrokes for the MathType editor, and most of them didn't work in the MS Equation editor, which annoyed me. Also, I had issues with parentheses formatting correctly but I suspect that's been fixed in the last 15 years.

Still, I really do prefer to work with Markdown in general. The Markdown -> Pandoc -> LaTeX rendering just ends up looking prettier in my opinion, and at this point I'm pretty useless in any editor that doesn't have Vim keystrokes. Pandoc irons out the parts of LaTeX that I really hate (the `` vs " being the thing that's given me the most headaches), while letting me drop into raw LaTeX when I need it; not even getting into the fact that there's just math stuff that (as far as I know) doesn't work in Word or MathType's equation editor (e.g. bussproof trees).

I do get pretty annoyed when people try and tell me that regular LaTeX is "just as easy" as Word, because even as someone who has a reasonably good handle on LaTeX I can say that is just not true. TeX is arcane and weird and annoying and inconsistent, and I don't blame people for using Word compared to it.

Re: Pandoc

#160

Post by weebull »

2cynykyl wrote: post #132
stakhanov wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

...and that's the problem. You can easily get distracted by the look of the words on the page. Is the heading big enough, centered, got enough white space around it. By the time you've faffed about with that, I'm onto my second or third paragraph of content.
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