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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#171

Post by Ringz »

thworp wrote: post #74
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…

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 o…

He doesn’t understand ct, nor can he grok the beauty of vim and all the muscle memory that doesn’t interrupt the (writing) flow. Since he learned to scroll with the mouse and click at a position to change something every problem is a nail.

Re: Pandoc

#172

Post by aktenlage »

kugurerdem wrote: post #151
pxeger1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"vapJ" might do the trick for one paragraph. So maybe you can make a mapping that does vapJ and moving to the next paragraph ("]]"?) in your vimrc will let you do this with a count.

Re: Pandoc

#173

Post by ternaryoperator »

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 tend to agree that most users don't know how to use Word well. I think this is true of IDEs as well. Most users, even technically savvy ones, use a small subset of features and disregard the lesser-used aspects. And then are later surprised when they see someone use a feature that they didn't know existed because it was outside the ambit of their immediate knowledge.

However, I'm not sure that even with greater knowledge of Word's features, whether developers in general would come to like it.

Re: Pandoc

#174

Post by cosmojg »

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…

1. Write prose in plaintext using preferred text editor

2. Add formatting using preferred markup language

3. ???

4. Profit!

Seriously, though, writing prose in a simple text editor and worrying about formatting later is far less distracting than writing prose in a WYSIWYG word processor. Also, adding formatting using a markup language ends up looking far nicer far faster than using a WYSIWYG word processor.

Re: Pandoc

#175

Post by ashton314 »

criddell wrote: post #170
chaxor wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other reasons to not like Word other than 'it six's. One is availability. If you're on Linux all day, your options don't really contain word - it's not free to download and install due to needing a license. You have to go and find some other computer that runs windows, and start it up - just for that one document. Then you have a single use computer, which obviously isn't a great experience. Closest thing t…

There is a free web version of Word that is pretty good.

You lost me at “web”. Local-first is so much nicer for my workflow—and I am sure this holds for most other people.

Re: Pandoc

#176

Post by throwaway81523 »

weebull wrote: post #155
2cynykyl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

TeX documents have a distinctive look because of their typography. Back when printed resumes were a thing, whenever I saw one done in TeX, I would recognize the CM font right away. I'd then look at the resume early, since I knew that it came from a nerd. Mine was of course also done that way.

Re: Pandoc

#177

Post by globular-toast »

I worked in a place where I was expected to produce documents in docx format. Having spend the last few years using TeX or just writing plain markdown stuff this was quite unappealing. So I opened Word once, created a template, and from then on used markdown to write documents (or perhaps it was org-mode). I never had to open Word again apart from making sure they looked OK. My documents looked better than everyone else's.

In a way, I hope I never have to use Pandoc again, but I'd hate for it to not exist.

Re: Pandoc

#178

Post by gen220 »

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're familiar with markdown and your book is basically text with some images, I'd strongly recommend Pandoc Markdown.

Pandoc Markdown-as-input is probably the best-supported input format for Pandoc, as far as "reasonable defaults for outputs in other formats" is concerned, and it's broadly compatible with the norms of other markdown styles.

You can always drop into latex, include custom CSS headers, etc. It's also a format where the "formatting" won't generally get in the way of actually-writing, unlike HTML or LaTeX (speaking on behalf of mere-mortals, here).

Re: Pandoc

#179

Post by lh4221 »

Pandoc is probably the best-maintained open-source software that I've ever worked with. We use it a lot internally at Column, and every time we've opened an issue, it has been comprehensively resolved in <24 hours. I'm a GitHub Sponsor and it's up there with coffee with the best money I spend on a monthly basis. JGM, you are a gift to everyone who spends too much time parsing word documents.

Re: Pandoc

#180

Post by nerdponx »

hadley wrote: post #157
nerdponx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that's how you frame it, then I stand corrected and I apologize for my incorrect criticism.
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