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Comment by qubital | Hacker News Reader

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qubital·

Pandoc http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/index.html can do that and much more.

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Also, Asciidoc (used e.g. for the git documentation) has been supporting this for a long while.

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#_manpage

"Much more" is a drastic understatement. Pandoc is awesome.

The only "convert X.txt to Y.txt" task that pandoc can not handle is X=wikipedia

I noticed that a few years ago and found it surprising but figured it would show up soon. Is there a technical reason it hasn't, or just lack of sufficient motivation an anyone's part?

Apparently wikipedia's format is a pain to parse. I think jgm posts here as fiddlosopher he is the best source for the gory details...

But there is definitely sufficient motivation just google "convert wikipedia to" for some examples. I think that the arcane syntax is a big lockin factor with large wikipedia based sites...

There is a ticket for it: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/388

Pandoc is indeed excellent. I suggest that anyone needing to write a man page just write it in Markdown and -- if a man page is necessary -- have Pandoc convert it.

"Write programs that do one thing and do it well." --Doug McIlroy

Pandoc does, it converts text from one format to another and it does it superbly...

Nobody was attacking you or your project. They are simply speaking about tools with similar uses.

Thanks for clarifying. Defensive instincts engage when one's pet project fades from the spotlight on its own stage. You're right about Pandoc fulfilling my quoted aspect of Unix philosophy; I realized it later but was too proud to admit it. :)

Funny how I'm instantly repulsed to try it because it's not a GitHub link.

The funnier part is that its actually distributed via github. Sorry not the troll food you were looking for.

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