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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#111

Post by CJefferson »

voltagex_ wrote: post #109
CJefferson wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latex can't produce web output, which is increasingly a target I want. Also, Latex can't produce any output which is accessible to blind people (other than giving them the raw LaTeX). The PDFs latex produces are probably the least accessible format available (much worse than a word proeuced pdf, or some html). This matters to me, and should matter more to other people (in my opinion).

>Also, Latex can't produce any output which is accessible to blind people This sounds like it should definitely be a target of a grant. I guess most government organisations around the world are using Word et al, which isn't too bad these days accessibility wise (AFAIK). Can you provide a small example of a LateX document that produces an inaccessible PDF?

If you grab any academic paper (particularly two columns) there is a good chance getting the text out will be hard, and any part of the paper with maths or tables will be unusable. Sorry. I'm away from a computer now, to make a smaller example.

Re: Pandoc

#112

Post by wadkar »

antt wrote: post #97
Terretta wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools, Track Changes, Compare Documents ... https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-and-merge-t... Had this forever, here's a visual on old version of Word: http://www.techyard.net/how-to-compare-two-word-documents-an... For more advanced, try legal blacklining: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/compare-document-di... Or combine multiple sources of a similar document: https://support.office.com/en-us/…

None of that is version control. At best that's a visual based manual patch file tool. That you can't concat two word files together in 2018 is ridiculous.

> That you can’t concat two word files

Of course you can!

# cat word1.doc word2.doc > word3.doc

Sounds ludicrous? So does your statement.

Setting aside the hyperbole, I believe it would be a conceptual nightmare to start defining concat of two docs. For simple cases, feel free to make copy pasta :-)

Re: Pandoc

#113

Post by mort96 »

icc97 wrote: post #44
Schiphol wrote: post #16

I do all of my academic writing in pandoc. As compared to LaTeX this means no boilerplate (yet you can still use full LaTeX syntax for equations and the like) and, if the publisher 'needs' a Word file, you are one click away from providing it. All with plain text files that you can put under version control, get meaningful diffs, etc. It's just great.

Sorry to be pedantic - but I didn't think that 'pandoc' was an actual document format purely a tool for converting between formats. Do you mean that you do your writing in kind of a 'pandoc flavoured' markdown? [0] [0]: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#pandocs-markdown

Well, between Pandoc's markdown flavor and how it has its own way of letting you insert latex code anywhere, you're not going to be able to process your document using anything that's not trying to be compatible with pandoc documents.

Re: Pandoc

#114

Post by wadkar »

myself248 wrote: post #82

The one thing it can't do is give HN posts descriptive titles.

Thanks, this made me chuckle. Its comments like these which make HN a bit more colorful :-)

Re: Pandoc

#115

Post by masklinn »

CJefferson wrote: post #111
voltagex_ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, Latex can't produce any output which is accessible to blind people This sounds like it should definitely be a target of a grant. I guess most government organisations around the world are using Word et al, which isn't too bad these days accessibility wise (AFAIK). Can you provide a small example of a LateX document that produces an inaccessible PDF?

If you grab any academic paper (particularly two columns) there is a good chance getting the text out will be hard, and any part of the paper with maths or tables will be unusable. Sorry. I'm away from a computer now, to make a smaller example.

The paper "GADTs Meet Their Match" (first I had in my list) seems to work fine, but I don't know what it was generated with.

Re: Pandoc

#116

Post by coldtea »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #103
lucb1e wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you diff two Word docs with Word? Afaik you can only hit the "track changes" button, which doesn't help if you got a new version of a document from someone else.

Even if you can do it with Word, GUI interactions aren't composable and extensible the way shell commands are, so you're limited to the features the GUI designer thought of.

>GUI interactions aren't composable and extensible the way shell commands are

They might not be in word, but they absolutely can be, and in fact are a superset of CLI interactions (since a GUI interaction step in e.g. Automator can invoke any shell command).

>so you're limited to the features the GUI designer thought of

And in the traditional shell pipeline (that is, not Powershell) I'm limited to working on dumb streams from one command to another.

Re: Pandoc

#117

Post by coldtea »

raws wrote: post #49
lucb1e wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you diff two Word docs with Word? Afaik you can only hit the "track changes" button, which doesn't help if you got a new version of a document from someone else.

Completely new to this: so you're highlighting the differences between two documents in word? say 2 terms of service 1 old and 1 new?

Yes

Re: Pandoc

#118

Post by TuringTest »

yitchelle wrote: post #104
thanatropism wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and you can merge changes too. Classic Word workflow: I make a document and send it to my boss; he makes some changes but suggests further research etc. and sends me his altered version, but I stupidly work on my own version . Making this right takes like four clicks.

I have been searching for this for a long time and not able to achieve it without resorting to manual copy and paste from one doc to the other. This sounds like utopia. :-) Do you have a link to a page that outlines these steps?

It works if you don't change formatting, don't edit the same section, don't rearrange chapters and don't have lots of changes or a large document. You do any of that, and the application crashes.

It's good for a small fix, but not something to rely upon in your main documentation workflow.

Re: Pandoc

#119

Post by TuringTest »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #51
lucb1e wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you diff two Word docs with Word? Afaik you can only hit the "track changes" button, which doesn't help if you got a new version of a document from someone else.

Hmmm. Wonder what "track changes" does if you Ctrl-A highlight the entire old doc, and paste the entire new doc over it. (I imagine it registers it as one huge change, rather than tracking a zillion individual changes, but it might be interesting to try.)

It does exactly that. I don't know why someone downvoted you for that comment.

Re: Pandoc

#120

Post by jonathanstrange »

Schiphol wrote: post #16

I do all of my academic writing in pandoc. As compared to LaTeX this means no boilerplate (yet you can still use full LaTeX syntax for equations and the like) and, if the publisher 'needs' a Word file, you are one click away from providing it. All with plain text files that you can put under version control, get meaningful diffs, etc. It's just great.

I tried and it didn't work for me. Pandoc's conversion functionality is good but unfortunately also fails very often, at least in my experience. I suppose with custom templates and a lot of trickery I could get it working for the kind of papers I write, but I've found it easier to convert LaTeX to Word manually when needed - which is a pain in the ass, too, of course.
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