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.
The ability to write and collaborate on memos in markdown, and turn them into fancy PDFs and .docs is seriously world changing.
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?
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.
Apparently U+3C1 is not set up for use with LaTeX and that seems to be a prerequisite for pdf. It helpfully suggests I try with --latex-engine=xelatex and that fails after a while because xetex.def isn't in the repositories anymore.
MiKTeX comes with an admin tool that has an option to synchronize repositories which supposedly fixes lots of problems, but apparently not this one.
For anybody that reads this and decides to get Pandoc and MiKTeX, I suggest getting the version of MiKTeX that bundles all of the dependencies. In the days of terabyte disks, I'm not sure it makes sense to pull down dependencies a few kilobytes at a time, especially if packages periodically go missing from the servers.
This is a side-by-side comparison of the HTML version and the generated PDF version: