
Happy 10th birthday pandoc - psibi
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pandoc-discuss/0rutNJAVKoc
======
jesserosenthal
A couple of cool things about pandoc:

1\. It's a tool built in large part by folks involved in the humanities. John,
of course, is a professor of philosophy. (We could stop there, since his
contributions so outnumber all the others, but I'll go on...) I'm an assistant
prof. of English. It has large contributions from the curator of medieval
manuscripts at the British Library, and contributions from a historian as
well. And those are just the ones that come to mind -- I'm sure there are
others. It's cool to have a tool used by many folks in the humanities, but
also in large part driven by their needs.

2\. John is a great project lead, and it's an amazingly open project. If
you're interested in getting started with haskell, the filters API allows you
to really adapt it to your needs. And if you're interested in adding another
reader or writer, there's a good chance it can be added.

For myself, I started out using the python docx library, found it didn't
handle enough stuff, wrote one myself (covering mainly my conversion needs,
not creation) and had it output JSON that pandoc could read. When that worked,
I ported it to haskell, and posted it to the mailing list. Within a few weeks,
the docx reader was part of the program. It's been a great experience -- both
in using haskell, and in playing a significant role in a program I use and
love.

------
confounded
Pandoc has made the recent push for reproducible research across the sciences
possible (via Rmarkdown/knitr and IPython/Jupyter) --- it's an essential part
of solving a pretty big epistemological problem!

(For me, it's also a large part of solving my own productivity problems.)

It's also driven markdown itself to become more feature rich and internally
consistent. I'm extremely appreciative of JGM's efforts to product a unified
markdown spec[^1].

Huge thanks, John!

[^1]: [http://commonmark.org/](http://commonmark.org/)

------
ggambetta
Happy birthday, Pandoc!

Pandoc is a key component in my Markdown-to-Kindle-and-Paperback pipeline. In
fact I've soft-published an article about it:
[https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-and-
publishe...](https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-and-published-my-
novel-using-only-open-source-tools-5cdfbd7c00ca)

Amazing piece of software. Not that often a tool dominates an use case so
thoroughly that there are virtually no alternatives, because there really is
no need. Thank you, John MacFarlane :)

~~~
thangalin
I had a problem converting embedded images and fonts from Markdown to EPUB;
this script helps by piggy-backing on the epub-embed-font option to include
images:

    
    
        #!/bin/bash
    
        FILENAME=$(cat title.txt).epub
        CSS=style.css
        IMAGES_DIR=images
    
        # Ensure images get embedded into the document.
        for url in $(grep image $CSS | grep url | sed 's/.*url( *\(.*\) *).*/\1/g'); do
          EMBED="$EMBED --epub-embed-font=$IMAGES_DIR/$url"
        done
    
        # Generate the ePub, including fonts and images.
        pandoc \
          --smart \
          --epub-cover-image=cover/cover.png \
          --epub-metadata=metadata.xml \
          --epub-stylesheet=$CSS \
          --epub-embed-font=fonts/MyUnderwood.ttf \
          $EMBED \
          -t epub -o $FILENAME output/*.vars
    

The .vars files are chapters that have their variable names substituted for
values, such as:

    
    
        for i in chapter/*.md; do
          out=$OUTDIR/$(basename $i);
          cat variables.yaml $i > $out;
          pandoc $out --template $out > $out.vars
    
          cat $out.vars | sed -e 's/;;/\$/g' |\
            pandoc --chapters -t context -o $OUTDIR/$(basename $i .md).tex;
        done
    

A handy trick to avoid duplication (of names, places, or any text really)
within the content.

------
Uehreka
Thanks to Pandoc, I never need to use Microsoft Word at work. If someone wants
me to upload some documentation to Sharepoint, I just write it in Markdown and
convert to docx with Pandoc. Wonderful piece of software.

~~~
bbcbasic
How do you update someone else's document?

------
dergachev
What an amazing project! I use it all the time, for converting between textile
(redmine) and markdown (everything else), and also for extracting my company's
proposals from Google Drive, and converting them to latex and PDF with our
customized template. The code for this is all here:
[https://github.com/dergachev/gdocs-
export](https://github.com/dergachev/gdocs-export)

Thanks so much to it's creators and contributors!

~~~
nandhp
Redmine actually has a Markdown mode, though it's probably too much work to
convert an existing Redmine installation (unless you can use pandoc?)

[http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineTextForm...](http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineTextFormatting)

------
planteen
I love the markdown to PDF converter using embedded LaTeX for math
expressions. So much easier than writing pure LaTeX and you still get a
beautiful result.

------
Johnny_Brahms
I have started using pandoc again recently since thier org support has gotten
a lot better in recent months. Using emacs, it is not a very hard decision to
use org mode over markdown or rst.

With org support in pandoc, i no longer have to start up emacs to generate
HTML for my website, so doing that in batches just got a lot easier.

~~~
stinkytaco
I found it's conversion into org (from OPML) isn't fantastic, but definitely
workable. But out of org is seamless for me as well.

------
therealmarv
Great project. Have written my whole thesis in Markdown thanks to Pandoc
(+Sublime+Latex+Zotero) and this great template
[https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown](https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown)

------
drostie
Happy birthday!

Pandoc is one of those things that I only recently discovered and totally fell
in love with: I wrote a bunch of code in literate Haskell for work, so that I
could have the logic right, and then ported it to JS to reduce the bus factor
of the project. When I discovered pandoc I just ran it on my literate Haskell
and the resulting PDF was so beautiful I had to print it out and tack it up on
a cubicle wall, like a "this is what they pay me for" type of reminder.

------
hypertexthero
I love Pandoc! Thank you, [John
MacFarlane]([http://johnmacfarlane.net/](http://johnmacfarlane.net/))!

------
kingkilr
Happy Birthday Pandoc!

The ability to write and collaborate on memos in markdown, and turn them into
fancy PDFs and .docs is seriously world changing.

~~~
criddell
I'm working on some mechanical engineering software that produces a report
that is heavy in tables and equations. Today we are generating html for
display and have an option to output the same report in pdf form. We use
htmldoc to do the html->pdf conversion. htmldoc is unbelievably fast, it's
also quite limited. It doesn't know about Unicode or CSS.

We've tried other more capable converters but they are an order of magnitude
slower than htmldoc. I guess Unicode and CSS support is expensive. htmldoc is
also better than anything else we've tried at not putting page breaks in the
middle of a table.

Would you say this type of report generation is something than Pandoc would be
suited for?

~~~
FraaJad
I'm a big fan of Pandoc. However, if you have a lot of tables in your
document, ASCIIDOCTOR is a better choice to produce PDFs.

ASCIIDOCTOR has clear and superior table formatting syntax and more
importantly it can work with CSV files. This way you don't have to copy paste
data into your reports.

[http://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-
manual/#tables](http://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#tables)

~~~
tome
Sounds like the next format that pandoc should support :)

~~~
FraaJad
IIRC, pandoc has asciidoc writer. ie., it can parse other formats and output
asciidoc/tor format.

------
j0e1
Enough of procrastination. It's time to finally start learning Haskell!

------
dredmorbius
It feels redundant to say this with all the others expressing the same
thoughts, but thank you thank you thank you John et al for Pandoc. It's been
life-changing since running into it a few years back.

I do a lot of work researching older and historical documents. Some of these
are available in only scans, meaning image-heavy PDFs, or rotten OCR
transcriptions. Occasionally I get lucky and find a solid ASCII source.

A recent case in point, Dugald Stewart's 1793 "Account of the Life and
Writings of Adam Smith", which I'd found in ASCII format.

A couple hours (mostly of finessing the markup) to pandoc, and I had a 72 page
PDF, ePub, and HTML versions, the former two posted online.

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/-h-b6ek6segi8eamq2g6vq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/-h-b6ek6segi8eamq2g6vq)

ASCII Source:
[http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/duga...](http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/dugald)

Markdown: [http://pastebin.com/LdKXpHdR](http://pastebin.com/LdKXpHdR)

PDF: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-
mAJPY0tfaXlQWUNwLWc...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-
mAJPY0tfaXlQWUNwLWc/view?usp=drivesdk)

ePub: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-
mAJPdXgwcm1NbDhQdEE...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-
mAJPdXgwcm1NbDhQdEE/view?usp=drivesdk)

(The Google Drive docs _should_ be world-readable.)

That's only one of many docs I've fixed up using Pandoc.

------
0xmohit
A huge thanks to John and all the contributors.

What's most amazing is it's ability to generate beautiful outputs (for
printing, viewing, presentations alike). Awesome.

------
ausjke
Using it all the time and love it.

The only issue I had though is that it does not convert certain charset
sometimes due to some latex related issues.

------
mtrn
Pandoc's Markdown to Word conversion saved me when I was writing a book.
Thanks and happy birthday!

------
zwetan
I love pandoc, thanks for this great tool :)

to me it's the perfect tool to generate user docs and manuals for software and
other cli tools, my best use case is markdown (github flavoured) to man,
markdown to HTML and PDF, etc.

------
jgalt212
Is pandoc the most famous/most used program written in Haskell?

~~~
codygman
I think it's the most used by non haskeller's. I'd say most used and most
famous is the ghc Haskell compiler.

------
erelde
Happy birthday, I used it for both outputting pdf, and often when encountering
a very long html pages without styling (quite common around these parts) to
output epub.

------
ihm
Thanks so much to all the contributors for such a useful tool. I use it to
convert markdown posts with embedded Latex to HTML for my blog.

------
chewyshine
Awesome productivity tool. Pandoc changed my entire document preparation
workflow. Thank you!

------
wiz21c
I like it but it still makes my life hard when I want to use french
typography...

~~~
FraaJad
I know nothing about French typography.. having said that..

pandoc allows you to use different LaTeX templates than the ones it ships
with. So, you can take the default templates, add the overrides necessary for
French typography and voilà! (hopefully).

------
ssebastianj
Pandoc just make me happy. Thanks John & contributors for your work!

------
jesuslop
Keep going and enhancing

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jackmaney
Pandoc is fantastic! Just a few days ago, I used it in a makefile to keep
markdown, HTML, and PDF versions of my resume in sync.

