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Pandoc Templates

pandoc-templates.org

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Re: Pandoc Templates

#51

Post by applicative »

chlaunchla wrote: post #15

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…

"→" is standard unicode; pandoc would have put it into the internal AST. If you were writing a pdf e.g. via pdflatex and tex fonts in olden times, a number of things might have gone wrong. Such a thing will pass unproblematically into the things like the going luatex - but similarly if you write the pdf via e.g. typst or one of the other engines.

It is true one ends up familiarizing oneself with peculiarities of the typesetting engine. The LLMs are lately teaching me bits and pieces about typst and typst+pandoc which I'm using for a writing project. They all seem infallible about pandoc curiosa.

Tables I agree are a nightmare in any plain text representation whatsoever - except with editor support which alas Word makes easy.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#52

Post by tikhonj »

maxerickson wrote: post #10
ktzar wrote: 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.

For the short, simple documents that most people make, a versioned, wysiwyg word processor is going to beat everything else. I mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.

WYSIWYG pretty consistently leads to visual and structural messes. It's only going to "beat" everything else if you don't care about quality.

Most people don't—and don't have to—care about quality for their short, simple documents, but that is neither good nor inevitable, and it's always worth trying to do better.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#53

Post by kergonath »

wodenokoto wrote: post #17

I’ve been looking for a template to use for fancy business reports, so I can do my stuff in R/Python/QMD and management can get something colorful to look at without me having to copy paste everything into PowerPoint

You might find Quarto ( https://quarto.org/ ) interesting. It sounds like it does what you want.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#56

Post by quijoteuniv »

Eisvogel template is a fantastic way to use Latex without knowing much about it, by transforming your markdown with Pandoc, mind you i used it before LLMs existed, but it was great to turn the notes of a project of a tesis into a super pro formated version without learning Latex.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#57

Post by JW_00000 »

limagnolia wrote: post #16
maxerickson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the short, simple documents that most people make, a versioned, wysiwyg word processor is going to beat everything else. I mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.

For most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.

This is what Word is to most people. They just use the default styles, or their company's template. No special formatting, styling etc.

Also if you do want to add a table or a figure, for most people Word will be much easier than doing the same in Markdown.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#58

Post by xorcist »

JW_00000 wrote: post #57
limagnolia wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.

This is what Word is to most people. They just use the default styles, or their company's template. No special formatting, styling etc. Also if you do want to add a table or a figure, for most people Word will be much easier than doing the same in Markdown.

Having handled Word documents a few times in my years, oh, how I wish this was true.

Re: Pandoc Templates

#59

Post by maleldil »

isatty wrote: post #54
ifh-hn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this a paid for app?

Yeah idk about all the typst HN shilling. Latex works great and is as free as it can get.

You can use Typst 100% for free, just like LaTeX. There's a CLI for compilation, there's an LSP, code formatter, etc. Complaining that the web app has a paid tier is like complaining that Overleaf is paid.

As for why people shill Typst over LaTeX, it's just a better overall experience. Things that are annoying in LaTeX are easy in Typst. I've written plenty of LaTeX for academic papers and my Master's dissertation, but I'm now writing my PhD thesis in Typst. It's so much better. The only barrier to using it everywhere is that my colleagues still prefer to use Overleaf for collaboration, which forces me to use LaTeX for papers.

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