Pandoc: universal document converter | Hacker News Reader

Pandoc: universal document converter

johnmacfarlane.net

103 pointsolalonde11 comments

One of the nifty applications of this is Gitit: store your files in a normal Git or Darcs repo, and then users can export the webpages in 16 formats.

And you can easily script it in Haskell - I wrote one plugin that archives external links in the Internet Archive & WebCitation, and another link which adds interwiki syntax to markdown, eg. '[Plato](!Wikipedia)' or '[abstruse](!Wiktionary)' or '[scanl](!Hoogle)' or '[gitit](!Hackage)'.

Did you extend Pandoc or Gitit? I would be very interested in extending/changing Pandoc slightly, but so far I got along with doing my changes with sed and writing some inline LaTeX.

If you extended Pandoc, do you mind giving a pointer to your source? I write Haskell poorly, so an example would be appreciated.

The plugins are bundled with Gitit. See:

https://github.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/plugins/Interwiki.h...

https://github.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/plugins/Subst.hs

https://github.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/plugins/WebArchiver...

They are meant for use with Gitit, but they are easily adapted for other purposes. For example, the archive code was easily adapted into a script to read Markdown files and spit out external links to stdout: http://groups.google.com/group/pandoc-discuss/browse_thread/...

I use Hakyll & Pandoc to maintain a single README in github which is also the webpage for Solarized. A little sed magic in Hakyll converts the github links. Makes life much easier.

Talk about Renaissance men: John Macfarlane's main activity lies in philosophy, and still he answers within hours most questions on the Pandoc mailing lists.

I'm actually writing my diploma thesis using Markdown and Pandoc. Some hacking is necessary (sed is so far sufficient), but it's a lot more pleasant then writing LaTeX directly.

While I agree that it's faster, I'm not sure whether it's more pleasant. After you get all the styling info out of the way, LaTeX is pretty easy to write...

I sometimes start writing papers in markdown using Pandoc too, but usually I eventually switch over to Latex when the formatting needs get more complicated. Still, it's a nice way to write. I love that Pandoc allows you to throw in arbitrary Latex markup wherever you want, easily allowing for math formulas and figure floats.

I used Pandoc to convert my online tutorial into a book for publishing:

http://leanpub.com/learn-python/

The whole process took about two minutes (pandoc converted all the HTML to basically perfect Markdown). I've told the guys who run leanpub about pandoc, hopefully they'll use it to compile all of its formats down to LaTeX so you can publish books much more easily.

I used Pandoc at a previous job when I got frustrated with writing documentation for our customer in OpenOffice.

Instead, I started writing markdown and wrote a script that used Pandoc to convert it to LaTeX, insert headers/footers and company logo etc, and finally used latexmk to output PDFs. This looked far more professional than the word documents we shipped previously.

It also successfully separated content (markdown text files) from presentation (handled by script), making sure all PDFs had a consistent look.

With documentation being just another buffer in emacs it was more often written/sketched when implementing, instead of being a task to do last when you had already run out of time.

It is also much easier for developers to follow changes to the documentation in the version control system, and merges are a breeze instead of a time-sink.

I use this all the time for running web pages (often blogs, as well as Project Gutenberg books and wikipedia pages) through LaTeX to convert them into a format more palatable on my ereader.

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