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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#231

Post by themadturk »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #115
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…

Rant ahead: So, as it must be me not knowing, can you tell me why Word won't let me change table column size ~50% of the time (for the same table from the same source). Half the time autofit works (yay!), half the time it won't let me resize columns, neither by typing the number, nor dragging the invisible off-page divider (Microsoft should just make the transparency of off-page content 50%??), nor changing to draft…

It's not you. Things like WordPerfect's "reveal codes" feature were a major reason law practices were so reluctant to give it up. It's far easier to fulfill a court's rules on how to format briefs when you have that kind of control over your document's formatting!

Re: Pandoc

#232

Post by dr_coffee »

themadturk wrote: post #224
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…

If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word. Word divides the document into discrete pages, while WordStar documents were long uninterrupted ribbons of text, just like Kerouac's rolls. Perhaps Kerouac "got it," but so do George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer, writers who continue to use WordStar decades after its demise (Sawyer even talks about the be…

You can just go to view >> web layout in MS Word to get a pageless view. And view >> print layout to go back to pages FYI

Re: Pandoc

#233

Post by hadley »

2cynykyl wrote: post #61
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.

From what I can tell, Quarto is essentially an installer for Knitr/R, that also comes with a bunch of goodies, like when working in VSC (or Rstudio) it auto-suggests cross-references to content in the document, like figures/chapters/equations/etc. It also has a github action that builds and deploys the site in like 1 one line. Just removing the friction and lowering the bar is very helpful sometimes.

That's true, but quarto also has full support for Python and Jupyter notebooks, not to mention julia, and observable. It's really built from the ground up to be multi-language so that everyone can benefit from all the goodies in RMarkdown.

Re: Pandoc

#234

Post by themadturk »

lhamil64 wrote: post #168
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

Out of curiosity, why use Pandoc? Can't Word natively save as HTML, PDF, etc?

Without an add-in (it may or may not exist anymore), Word cannot natively read from (and format) or write to (with markup) Markdown. Ask any one of several novelists who work in Markdown; once you convert it to Word (presumably via Pandoc) and send it to your editor/publisher, it stays in Word throughout the rest of the editorial process.

Re: Pandoc

#235

Post by ren_engineer »

themadturk wrote: post #224
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…

If you're going to bring up Kerouac with his rolls of paper, you're better off talking about WordStar than Word. Word divides the document into discrete pages, while WordStar documents were long uninterrupted ribbons of text, just like Kerouac's rolls. Perhaps Kerouac "got it," but so do George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer, writers who continue to use WordStar decades after its demise (Sawyer even talks about the be…

I'm not sure I'd use GRRM to support anything regarding writing productivity

Re: Pandoc

#237

Post by pmags »

hadley wrote: post #190
pmags wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And knitr is built on the prior art foundations of Sweave....

And sweave is built on noweb :)

...which was based on CWEB/WEB and so on... ;-)

Though I guess we can stop there in this particular case, unless someone knows of an example of literate programming that precedes Knuth. I'd be interested if there are such examples...

Re: Pandoc

#238

Post by themadturk »

globular-toast wrote: post #177

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 e…

You are my hero.

Re: Pandoc

#239

Post by themk »

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 thought the solution to hardwrapping in email was to use the text/plain with format=flowed.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3676

Re: Pandoc

#240

Post by ska »

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.

> I was thinking mostly about the computer savvy academics who use Latex for everything.

To be fair, for a significant number of things LaTeX is the better environment, even with it's own issues.

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