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Twenty Years of Pandoc

pandoc.org

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Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#31

Post by huijzer »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #28

A few years ago, I gobbled together some bash scripts around pandoc to build a site generator for my personal website. Works great. I use html templates, markdown for the content, etc. Mostly the bash scripts just serve to list files and process them one by one. I actually process them concurrently by forking processes so it's reasonably fast. A bit wonky but it works fine for my use case. As for Haskell, I guess tre…

I can imagine that it works great, but at the same time I have also used plain Rust to generate HTML. It’s not that hard to generate valid HTML. Parsing however is a different thing. That’s hard. For Markdown source, there are libraries to parse the Markdown. That’s a bit more work to get right, but at the same time Pandoc also requires some tweaks and configuration to get right, plus getting the dependency installed in your environment(s). I personally would go for the Rust libraries way for a new project for flexibility sake but wouldn’t say the other way is wrong per se.

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#32

Post by sdoering »

koolba wrote: post #19

Pandoc is awesome. My fav usage is configuring git to use it to normalize binary docs to markdown (like a .docx) so they can be diffed. Works amazing for redlining contacts.

Wow. Thanks. This is an awesome idea. Will blatantly steal. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#33

Post by maleldil »

darthoctopus wrote: post #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.

How do you usually collaborate with other authors? I don't know your area, but it's common to use Overleaf to collaborate on papers, and you're stuck with LaTeX there. I wrote the first draft of my thesis in Typst, but then converted to LaTeX to get feedback on Overleaf from other people.

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#34

Post by vovavili »

aanet wrote: post #12

That a professor of philosophy [1] made tools [2] that are used by millions around the world... that's just mind boggling. In a good (great!) way. Pandoc is my go-to tool. Thank you, Sir! [1] https://johnmacfarlane.net/index.html [2] https://johnmacfarlane.net/tools.html

His interests are in early analytic philosophy, philosophy of language and formal logic. This niche is what created the foundations for both theoretical computer science and formal programming languages. This is kind of a reason why quite a few of big names in tech are from a philosophy background - Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, etc.

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#35

Post by tialaramex »

PeterStuer wrote: post #26

"The choice of Haskell has also led to a high quality and low volume of contributors" I feel this influence of choosing a tech stack and its impact on self selected and auto-reenforced culture is most often underestimated. From my own experience, at a time I was (involuntarily) working in Java, and when .Net was released, from a pure technical point of view it was like a breath of fresh air. Java was suffering from o…

Maybe try F#. Those "2 week CRUD bootcamp" people all write C# but the people writing F# are more likely to have some actual engineering because it's an ML but just .NET flavoured.

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#36

Post by jnpnj »

PeterStuer wrote: post #26

"The choice of Haskell has also led to a high quality and low volume of contributors" I feel this influence of choosing a tech stack and its impact on self selected and auto-reenforced culture is most often underestimated. From my own experience, at a time I was (involuntarily) working in Java, and when .Net was released, from a pure technical point of view it was like a breath of fresh air. Java was suffering from o…

> "The choice of Haskell has also led to a high quality and low volume of contributors"

I find this mindset very refreshing in the era of availability often implying noise over signal.

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#39

Post by SiempreViernes »

vovavili wrote: post #34
aanet wrote: post #12

That a professor of philosophy [1] made tools [2] that are used by millions around the world... that's just mind boggling. In a good (great!) way. Pandoc is my go-to tool. Thank you, Sir! [1] https://johnmacfarlane.net/index.html [2] https://johnmacfarlane.net/tools.html

His interests are in early analytic philosophy, philosophy of language and formal logic. This niche is what created the foundations for both theoretical computer science and formal programming languages. This is kind of a reason why quite a few of big names in tech are from a philosophy background - Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, etc.

Oh hey, I'm sure his Stanford philosophy teachers are very impressed by how Thiel took their teaching to hearth and these days offer compelling arguments for why Greta Thunberg is a servant of the Antichrist. /s

Re: Twenty Years of Pandoc

#40

Post by whalesalad »

adamddev1 wrote: post #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 wi…

You can build things this simple and elegant with LLM’s you just need to instruct them to do so.
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