Twenty Years of Pandoc

10 comments

• malkosta 9 minutes ago
  Love pandoc, I use it for all sorts of stuff…here is my minimal static site generator:

  find . -name '*.md' -type f -exec sh -c '

    for file do  
      out="docs/${file#./}"  
      out="${out%.md}.html"
      mkdir -p "$(dirname "$out")"  
      pandoc --quiet --template template.html "$file" -o "$out"  
    done  
  

  ' sh {} +
• adamddev1 1 hour ago
  > by writing N parsers (“readers”) and M renderers (“writers”), one could support N × M conversions.

  Beautiful writeup for a wonderful project. In an age of vibe-coding hype it's also so nice to see how things can be extended and snowball in usefulness when things are built correctly, by hand, from basic principles.

  > Perhaps, then, in the future, people will no longer have a need for tools like pandoc.

  I think we will need wonderful things like pandoc more and more. As mentioned there is a huge ecological and practical difference. Even if LLMs could get infintisamally close to deterministic-level reliability, it's still so many more orders of magnitude better in efficiency, especially with big batch jobs etc.
• rahimnathwani 1 hour ago
  Pandoc is great. I use it multiple times per day to move content between Outlook emails and a coding harness:

  https://gist.github.com/rahimnathwani/210b1f9cb6ce731a304322...

    cat email-to-xyz.md | md2clip
  
    clip2md > email-from-xyz.md
• jiehong 3 hours ago
  Thanks so much for pandoc!

  I never heard about djot [0], is anyone using it?

  [0]: https://djot.net/
• rao-v 1 hour ago
  I have at times mused that writing the internal state of pandoc to disk (yes 13th standard etc) would be the most interoperable file format
• dannyobrien 49 minutes ago
  My most used pandoc snippet:

  tidyhtml () { pandoc -f html-native_divs-native_spans -t markdown-raw_html-raw_attribute | pandoc -f markdown -t html }

  which strips out styling, wrapper divs, spans, inline attributes, etc from (for instance) HTML copied from a google or word doc. Just the semantic goodness!
• darthoctopus 3 hours ago
  Thank you for pandoc. I made the (at the time perhaps not transparently wise) choice to go all in on it when I started my PhD, and that decision has paid nothing but dividends since. I owe my career as a scientist to it.
• graemep 2 hours ago
  Pandoc is amazing. I have HTML and want a PDF? One command and it just works painlessly. That was just my last use of pandoc this weekend. I do not use it that often, but when I do its perfect.
• oytech 1 hour ago
  Effort worth admiration. Thank you for creating pandoc! It allowed me to write my CV in more readable markdown, but also get nice pdf with latex.
• BeetleB 47 minutes ago
  pandoc was (and still is) critical to some of my flows. I hope it never dies!