I have many books underway and I'd like to use pandoc in my automated artifact gen workflow, especially for makkng epub files. But I have not got it working the way I want yet.
In theory I like its design. as a CLI guy
Pandoc
191–200 of 298 posts
Re: Pandoc
#192Re: Pandoc
#193Earlier 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…
Word is the worst very popular program for the inverse reason of why Excel is the best; the extent to which a regular user can easily determine and or modify "why something they see on the screen appears the way it does."
In Excel, you click on the cell and see either e.g. the number or formula used to get the result you see.
In Word, well, it's just difficult to figure out exactly why a thing looks the way it does.
Re: Pandoc
#194This 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 thought writing code in vim was debatable, but emails...you went to far for me.
Re: Pandoc
#195I 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.
damn, I'll try that
Re: Pandoc
#196Pandora is awesome. Add a self published author, this is a key tool in my tickets to have a single source of truth and (relatively) easily create beautiful PDFs and EPUBs. I previously used restructured text and had to write custom tooling, but now I can write markdown on Jupyter.
And by "Pandora" .... I mean pandoc, and that I hate typing on my phone
Re: Pandoc
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's ideal for hiring - you immediately know which resumes to read and which one to dump into the trash.
Re: Pandoc
#198Every couple of years I need pandoc for some project. And teach time I relearn the same idiosyncrasies. Some odd defaults, the sometimes annoying depths you have to do to customize HTML templates, the weird filter infrastructure. What a neat strange program it is.
I have this same issue, and the same with `jq` and `GNU Parallel`. When you need them you need them, and nothing else quite works, but I have to re-learn them every time.
Same here! Haha.
Can you think of any command-line tool you might not use for 6 or 12mo but when you crack it open after a long time it is intuitive how to do what you need to?
I hypothesize muscle memory is required for efficiency at the command line.
Re: Pandoc
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have this same issue, and the same with `jq` and `GNU Parallel`. When you need them you need them, and nothing else quite works, but I have to re-learn them every time.
Which is actually quite a strong point for guis, amidst all their problems
Agreed, surely if there's one button in a GUI that will just do the thing you need (say, spitting out a PDF version of the document you're editing) but you'd otherwise need to recall multiple command-line programs, options, and/or arguments.
However, often I'll open up a GUI I haven't used in a while and feel like I'm just as lost as I am with a command-line tool I haven't used in a while. I rely on notes I've taken and try to stick with stable software.
Re: Pandoc
#200Earlier 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…
> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly".
I used to teach how to write serial letters with Word to secretaries when I was in high school. I used to write VBA macros that call in and out SAP systems when I was a junior software engineer - because "I was young and I needed the money."™
Now I either write in Emacs or Sublime on a Linux box with 2 TB RAM, or in Overleaf (LaTeX collab Web application), and I say: "Word sucks", I shall be suffering no more.
Word does not exist in my operating system (except for QEMU), and nobody notices.
LaTeX creates beautifully typeset publications, and most day to day writing requires nothing more than plain text, which is the most durable format.