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Pandoc Templates

pandoc-templates.org

41–50 of 65 posts

Re: Pandoc Templates

#41
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, most people don't want to do that, they want the burden of applying styles to the couple headings or whatever. Unfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.

Agreed. There is actually a lot better control in openoffice / libreoffice than most people know. You just have to set up your styles and be systematic about (virtually) never using direct formatting, instead always applying a pre-configured style. There is a distinct value in seeing your final product as you work, when the final product is visual.

And if you define shortcut keys for your styles it's as quick to type as markdown.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#42
post #30

I used to use pandoc for my bachelors papers, which needed to be submitted as word documents. I never used templates but had a rather large "one-liner" pandoc command to convert my markdown files. At the time I'd not got round to understanding the yaml front matter etc. I even user Zettlr for a while [0]. I then discovered quarto [1] and this changed everything. Much nicer experience. I used this for my masters paper…

pandoc is my "document converter" go-to tool.

Quarto is my documentation tool.

For me, they are both massively used, but cover different usages.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#43
post #30

I used to use pandoc for my bachelors papers, which needed to be submitted as word documents. I never used templates but had a rather large "one-liner" pandoc command to convert my markdown files. At the time I'd not got round to understanding the yaml front matter etc. I even user Zettlr for a while [0]. I then discovered quarto [1] and this changed everything. Much nicer experience. I used this for my masters paper…

Neat. Now I need Quarto, but with Elixir and Livebook!

I have my crazy notes on Quarto and word documents here, https://github.com/apwheele/Blog_Code/tree/master/Quarto/Rep.... Hopefully useful for others reading these comments.

I don't even know what magic buttons I need to push to get that template to correctly inherit the table format I wanted from pandoc, but it does. I tend to have other scripts though for more complicated tables though. So if I want a table to have a certain row highlighted a different color, I would write a Powershell script to run after the table was generated.

I was never able to figure out how to use LibreOffice to insert the table of contents and then export to PDF (although I can do it via the GUI).

Re: Pandoc Templates

#44
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Pandoc w/ Typst. I've published many books using it. In fact, just had a friend with a traditionally published book who is now self-pubbing ask me yesterday about my tools. I recommended Pandoc and Typst. He (surprisingly to me) had never heard of Typst, but within the hour replied that (with the use of AI) he had a great-looking template for the book. (Try doing that with LaTeX).

Could you elaborate on your workflow? Which tool do you start in (presumably it's a sequential flow?)? When is it that you go across the tools?

Jupyter to markdown to typst. Pandoc does the last conversation. (Pandoc also creates epubs for me).

I have some custom filters for index entries and code formatting.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#45
post #26
post #3

Pandoc is such an amazing piece of software. I used it to format my novel and made it part of a GitHub action to produce all the formats I required. I wasn't aware of templates, but some look really sleek. I keep thinking that modern text editors are just flawed and markdown, with all its downsides and limitations, is what 99% is the people need.

You should be aware that pandoc markdown has extensive non-standard additions to the language to make it usable. If you want a pure markup language that is simple, plain text readable and able to produce text more complex than what a type writer could manage in 1920 then restructured text is the way to go.

pandoc has infinitely many devices for including various commands. A lua filter - to take one standard example - can manage basically anything you cook up. The going AIs can write them for you and your triggering syntax at the drop of a hat. Inter alia, you can write your restructured text in markdown and include bits like this.

Here is normal Pandoc Markdown text.

```{=rst} .. note:: This is a native reStructuredText directive! Pandoc will not parse or change this text. It goes straight to the rST output writer. ```

Back to normal Markdown text.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#46

Pandoc is an impressive piece of software but I could never quite get PDF generation working nicely with it. Table layouts were often broken, with text overlapping into adjacent fields. Unicode font fallback didn't work properly, with characters like "→" being silently dropped because they didn't exist in the main font. Having predictable control of page breaks, to avoid situations where header text didn't stick to t…

To address that, a long while back I used a Markdown to Ruby Prawn to PDF generator. I could not find a generic mainstream tool supporting this…

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Re: Pandoc Templates

#47
Pandoc can be a bit painful to set up, but once it’s in your workflow, it’s hard to replace. Especially when you care about repeatable formatting and multiple outputs.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#48

Pandoc is an impressive piece of software but I could never quite get PDF generation working nicely with it. Table layouts were often broken, with text overlapping into adjacent fields. Unicode font fallback didn't work properly, with characters like "→" being silently dropped because they didn't exist in the main font. Having predictable control of page breaks, to avoid situations where header text didn't stick to t…

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