Live data from Hacker News

Twenty Years of Pandoc

pandoc.org

1–10 of 55 posts

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#2
Thank you for pandoc. I made the (at the time perhaps not transparently wise) choice to go all in on it when I started my PhD, and that decision has paid nothing but dividends since. I owe my career as a scientist to it.

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#4
Pandoc is amazing. I have HTML and want a PDF? One command and it just works painlessly. That was just my last use of pandoc this weekend. I do not use it that often, but when I do its perfect.

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#6
> by writing N parsers (“readers”) and M renderers (“writers”), one could support N × M conversions.

Beautiful writeup for a wonderful project. In an age of vibe-coding hype it's also so nice to see how things can be extended and snowball in usefulness when things are built correctly, by hand, from basic principles.

> Perhaps, then, in the future, people will no longer have a need for tools like pandoc.

I think we will need wonderful things like pandoc more and more. As mentioned there is a huge ecological and practical difference. Even if LLMs could get infintisamally close to deterministic-level reliability, it's still so many more orders of magnitude better in efficiency, especially with big batch jobs etc.

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#9
My most used pandoc snippet:

tidyhtml () { pandoc -f html-native_divs-native_spans -t markdown-raw_html-raw_attribute | pandoc -f markdown -t html }

which strips out styling, wrapper divs, spans, inline attributes, etc from (for instance) HTML copied from a google or word doc. Just the semantic goodness!

Post reply on HN