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Pandoc

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Re: Pandoc

#51

Post by peterhull90 »

mapreduce wrote: post #46

A question to experienced Pandoc users: I want to write a small book that I want to generate in 3 formats: HTML pages, EPUB and PDF. What is the best input format (source format) for the book? Pandoc Markdown? CommonMark? GFM? I'm a little hesitant to committing myself to Pandoc Markdown or any Markdown because they all have tiny differences with each other. Each is like its own standard. I considered Org-mode for so…

Might depend on what kind of book it is - do you have a lot of images, tables, cross-references, ... or is it mostly plain text?

Re: Pandoc

#52

Post by weinzierl »

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]…

It is one of the most useful programs I use and the only useful program I ever used that was written in Haskell.

Re: Pandoc

#53

Post by Brajeshwar »

While looking for Pandoc + Make for Website templates, I stumbled on the Website of Jilles van Gurp[1] (hi @jillesvangurp[2]) and I have seen it evolved over time. It is beautiful[3].

1. https://www.jillesvangurp.com

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jillesvangurp

3. https://github.com/jillesvangurp/www.jillesvangurp.com

Re: Pandoc

#54

Post by jjice »

I've been (slowly) writing a book for about a year and a half now probably, and Pandoc has made it so easy. I write everything in Markdown and use a seven-ish line Makefile and that's it. It generates the PDF and EPUB both extremely well and the customizability of everything in the generation process is fantastic.

I end up using it for random doc generation too in my day to day. It's just a damn fine piece of software that always works and has every feature I could dream up for my use cases.

Re: Pandoc

#55

Post by ravi-delia »

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

You know what, that's a sufficiently cursed workflow that it wraps back around to adding nerd cred

Re: Pandoc

#56

Post by datadrivenangel »

spinningslate wrote: post #6

Pandoc is one of my favourite all time tools. As the website says: > If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife It also sits at the heart of Quarto[0], which adds Jupyter-like code execution (in R, Python and others) into document production. Combined with RStudio as an IDE, it's my new favourite way to write anything - from static documents to full on code noteb…

Quarto is amazing for creating reports and programmatic slide decks!

Re: Pandoc

#57

Post by 2cynykyl »

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 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 using rolls of paper instead of sheets so he didn't have to stop is his process. He "got it".

As for pandoc, yes it's amazing, and I have been using it to convert my word documents to markdown so I can publish a technical textbook I'm working on using Quarto. I tried writing directly in Quarto for a while, but as per my point above, it really slowed me down and distracted me from actually writing, so I figured out the pandoc pipeline. My most favoritest feature so far is that it converts tables AND equations to markdown and latex perfectly. It's so seamless that I'd actually recommend Word->pandoc as the best way to write a complicated markdown table.

Re: Pandoc

#59

Post by Karellen »

malloc-0x90 wrote: post #9

I tried to use it to make an invoice system: wanted to convert plain-text CSV (description,amount,cost) --> to Markdown tables --> to PDF. But I was unable to align the following 2nd table with taxes: cells are all over the place and it does whatever it wants. And there is no information online to be found about it. (I eventually gave up long time ago and still to this day manually do them in LibreOffice Writer addin…

Have you looked at hledger, which generates everything from plain-text accounts files?

https://hledger.org/

https://hledger.org/invoicing.html

https://plaintextaccounting.org/

One previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20012499

Re: Pandoc

#60

Post by mapreduce »

peterhull90 wrote: post #51
mapreduce wrote: post #46

A question to experienced Pandoc users: I want to write a small book that I want to generate in 3 formats: HTML pages, EPUB and PDF. What is the best input format (source format) for the book? Pandoc Markdown? CommonMark? GFM? I'm a little hesitant to committing myself to Pandoc Markdown or any Markdown because they all have tiny differences with each other. Each is like its own standard. I considered Org-mode for so…

Might depend on what kind of book it is - do you have a lot of images, tables, cross-references, ... or is it mostly plain text?

Mostly plain text but some images, tables and cross-references too.
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