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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#291

Post by aldanor »

michaelrpeskin wrote: post #75
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…

I agree with your premise of "don't be distracted" when writing, but for me Word often is the distraction. I use a live-preview markdown editor (e.g., Typora, MarkText) to let me get my thoughts onto paper (screen) with low friction. It's easier to just hit "#" rather than drag the mouse to the style bar and select heading. Or more importantly for me, it's so much easier to hit "$" and seamlessly go into LaTeX for ma…

Quarts is great.

There's also Typst which is the new kid on the block but seemingly very good.

Re: Pandoc

#292

Post by michaelcampbell »

meonkeys wrote: post #198
michaelcampbell wrote: post #22

Earlier 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.

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.

> 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?

Most of them that I do use; sed, awk, even perl. I don't bust them out often, but when I do most of what I need is pretty "front of mind".

I'm not asserting it's necessarily a tool issue vs a "me" issue, but jq, parallel, and pandoc (although pandoc the least of these) just don't "click" with me, and even if I use them multiple times a month I have to go back to previous commands, --help, or man pages routinely.

Re: Pandoc

#293

Post by friendzis »

themadturk wrote: post #225
friendzis wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO entirely user. Word (and similar text processors) is a toolset. All it gives you are tools. Word lets you define formatting rulesets, lets you apply formatting rules and create rulesets from applied rules. Some evangelists may say that "safe" text processor would only allow application of rulesets, because direct application of rules leads to "spaghetti formatting". However that is one of the powers of WYSIWYG te…

But what of the potential lack of a compatible toolset on the other end of this pipeline? Even embedding styles in a Word document offers no assurance the document will appear as you intend when they receive it, much less if they offer edits and comments and send it back.

I don't get your point. Since IIRC Office 2007, docx is the default format which is designed for compatibility. IIRC it allows embedding of fonts and other non-text content, making compatibility concerns an edge case. If all parties use relatively recent version of MS Office with overlapping featureset, there should be no compatibility concerns, unless somewhere in the collaborative pipeline you are departing Office ecosystem altogether.

I don't think discussion around fault is meaningful in such scenario altogether.

Re: Pandoc

#294

Post by herdcall »

andy99 wrote: post #35
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'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 actually found more control in writing complex formulas and scientific notation with MD and then using pandoc to convert than with Word directly. Also, it's almost magical how pandoc does the conversion: fast, accurate, and without fuss.

Re: Pandoc

#295

Post by mrehler »

ufmace wrote: post #242
susam wrote: post #47

Pandoc is the FFmpeg of document conversion! While I am very fond of both tools, Pandoc's command-line interface seamlessly integrates with my understanding and intuition, unlike FFmpeg's byzantine command line options and concepts. With FFmpeg, I frequently find myself documenting specific incantations and recipes in my notes, lest I should forget how to solve certain conversion problems. Pandoc, on the other hand,…

Funny thing, while FFmpeg's CLI options aren't super intuitive, I do find it much easier to use than any GUI video editing or conversion program I've ever found. Those things can really write the book on byzantine user interfaces. At least Google or ChatGPT can usually give me fairly clear sets of options for FFmpeg that will do what I want.

We got a new video system at a work that is a bit beyond my knowledge, but the files it puts out are very big (read the Apple ProRes whitepaper to figure out which option on this system would give us the smallest video files). I've owned Apple's Compressor on my own Mac for years now and never used it, and even it's a bit less intuitive than I'd like.

Re: Pandoc

#296

Post by lightspot21 »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #290
lightspot21 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) It doesn't scale. At all. I used to work at a university lab group where all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page, heavily technical reports with lots of diagrams and tables spanning pages. To be clear, most of the…

> all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this. > LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad) I wrote my MSc and PhD thesis in LaTeX (physics) so I know how fantastic it is. You write content without caring for the container - and since changi…

> As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this.

Indeed Google Docs is much better - we also used that - but it's still a WYSIWYG editor, which IMHO it translates to 'extremely hard to enforce style'.

> I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if it supports truly concurrent editing) is the graal.

Yep, Overleaf was what we used. Its paid version was very much like Google Docs but on a plaintext editor wrt. to concurrent access. It could even do change tracking, comments, all the jazz, even Git synching (which we used for backups and CI)

> The drawback is that you need to know the language to cooperate. In a university setting this is not complicated, in a company - not so much.

I'm curious as to why. If the company is new and built on LaTeX from the very beginning why not? When I joined, I didn't know the language at all, but that wasn't a problem-one would learn on the job.

Re: Pandoc

#297

Post by BrandoElFollito »

lightspot21 wrote: post #296
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this. > LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad) I wrote my MSc and PhD thesis in LaTeX (physics) so I know how fantastic it is. You write content without caring for the container - and since changi…

> As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this. Indeed Google Docs is much better - we also used that - but it's still a WYSIWYG editor, which IMHO it translates to 'extremely hard to enforce style'. > I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if…

> If the company is new and built on LaTeX from the very beginning why not?

It really depends on the company. I worked (and work) in large high-tech companies and whenever I tried to introduce something like Markdown I quickly hit he wall of non-technical people who did not want to try a new system. They new Word, were suffering with Word but did not have the mindset to give a try to something different.

For the ones on Google Docs it was even more difficult because, arguably, Google Docs is a really neat product for collaboration.

My teams use Markdown for all text (either Obsidian or internal wikis) but this is because they are good in what they do and that they fear their management line :) :) (just kidding)

Re: Pandoc

#298

Post by yashrk »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #276
yashrk wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Google Docs are incompatible with complex formatting (LibreOffice and even Office365 are too). Moreover, even the Word itself is kinda incompatible with complex formatting: sooner or later one of your collaborators will copy/paste some text with a formatting you will be just unable to change/clear.

Anyway, Word «collaborative» features are so much worse than git repository and pull requests! And even you need to collaborate with some extremely non-technical folks, in the case of LaTeX they still use add comments to the PDF file — and this workflow is still way more productive than editing the same Word document.

Other reasons to not to use Word in collaborative pipelines are already mentioned in neighbor threads.

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