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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#271

Post by bostik »

dkasak wrote: post #229
bostik wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd settle for a Markdown import. You could do your editing and writing of raw text in whatever you feel happy with, and then have gdocs transform it to its supposedly native format on upload. Gdocs would then really only need to support the same semantics with underscores, asterisks, octothorpe heading levels and title sizes.

Oh boy, do I have a treat for you. Try saving the following as `input.md`: # Hello *world* ## Math $$x = 2 \cdot y^3$$ - foo - bar - baz 1. Yes 2. No 3. Maybe --- Right Left Center Default ------- ------ ---------- ------- 12 12 12 12 123 123 123 123 1 1 1 1 Table: Demonstration of simple table syntax. Then run pandoc -t html input.md | xclip -selection clipboard -t 'text/html' And paste into a Google doc.

Whoah, that is a seriously neat trick. Thank you.

Re: Pandoc

#272

Post by ofou »

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 use it for writing my thesis, obviously it should be done in LATEX but I ended up using markdown + a yaml config file for some templates

Re: Pandoc

#274

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

Pandoc is amazing and immensely useful. Just in case you need something simpler, let me suggest Hastyscribe.

Statically compiled cross-platform program for convertng markdown to self-contained portable HTML with a nice styling embedded by default. Simple, small, fast, hackable, written in Nim.

https://h3rald.com/hastyscribe/

https://github.com/h3rald/hastyscribe

Re: Pandoc

#275

Post by dredmorbius »

dredmorbius wrote: post #257
kps wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably use it every day, without noticing, to view markdown docs in a terminal, via a `.lessfilter` invoking [my fork of] https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/pandoc-terminal-writer I also very much like Pandoc-markdown's ‘simple table’ syntax, because it's actually human-readable and human-writable without confusion and pain.

less filters are another highly underappreciated tool. Back in the day there were a couple of utilities (I think they were "catdoc" and "wordview") which could take MS Word input and generate text-only output. Good for reading MS Word attachments in mutt or from a terminal / console / SSH session.

For those curious / on a nostalgia trip, "mswordview" was the name at the time. The project lives as the wvWare library, which reads and parses MS Word 2000, 97, 95, and 6 file formats:

https://wvware.sourceforge.net/>

A primer on lessfilter:

https://www.miskatonic.org/2020/06/24/lessfilter/>

And lesspipe:

https://www-zeuthen.desy.de/~friebel/unix/lesspipe.html>

Re: Pandoc

#276

Post by BrandoElFollito »

yashrk wrote: post #264
gertlex wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but when you start saying what other people 'should' be doing then they're going to speak up. That's not a prerequisite for the Latex folks, in my experience :D (I'm also in the "wrote my masters thesis in word, including the fair number of equations" group)

Of course you can choose what you use for your personal pipeline. But Word for collaborative work is a nightmare. Sometimes fastest way to work with the science text or documentation in a Word document is to hire a freelancer to retype all the text in LaTeX or something else. It's a kind of Trolley problem: sometimes Word fanboys, unfortunately, _should_ suffer to let all the team get the job done.

> But Word for collaborative work is a nightmare

Why? It has comments, tracking etc. Concurrent edition i impossible, though (even when MS says it is possible). For that Google Docs is great (or some self-hosted systems)

Re: Pandoc

#278

Post by chongli »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #95
_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…

Is there a way to lock documents in some way, so that direct formatting is disallowed and only styles work? Not that we could truly lock a document, but at least having some sort of header that lists allowed features, such that one would get a warning whenever they veered off course?

Sometimes direct formatting is the correct choice, such as when applying bold or italics to individual words or sentences within a paragraph. Making a separate style for those is lunacy!

Re: Pandoc

#279

Post by michaelcampbell »

mekster wrote: post #137
michaelcampbell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I was speaking more generally, not pandoc in particular.

But even with packages in a manager, there have been times where different packages conflict on different dependencies that when packaged up in a well written docker image (which not all are) would have obviated.

As a developer I see this more with programming languages than other things, and this very thing is what led to language "package management systems" like rbenv, sdkman, asdf, and the like.

Re: Pandoc

#280

Post by compumetrika »

I'm surprised to see no one has pointed out RMarkdown + RStudio[1] as one simple, low-effort way interface with Pandoc using an IDE you may already use.

I used to write papers and slides in LaTeX (using vim, because who needs render previews), then eventually switched to Pandoc (also vim). I eventually discovered RMarkdown+RStudio. I was looking for a nice way to format a simple table and discovered that rmarkdown had nice extensions of basic markdown (this was many years ago so maybe that is incorporated into vanilla markdown/pandoc).

The RMarkdown page claims:

> R Markdown supports dozens of static and dynamic output formats including HTML, PDF, MS Word, Beamer, HTML5 slides, Tufte-style handouts, books, dashboards, shiny applications, scientific articles, websites, and more.

...which I think is largely due to using pandoc as the core generator.

RStudio shows you the pandoc command it runs to generate your document, which I've used to figure out the pandoc command I want to run when I've switched to using pandoc directly.

This is a bit of a "lazy" way to interact with pandoc. Maybe the "laziest" aspect: when I get a new computer, I can install the entire stack by installing Rstudio, then opening a new rmarkdown document. Rstudio asks whether I'd like to install all the necessary libraries -- click "yes" and that's it. Maybe that sounds silly but it used to be a lot of work to manage your LaTeX install. These days I greatly favor things that save me time, which seems to get more precious every year.

[1] https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com

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