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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

Just in time! I use pandoc to generate PDF files from markdown, but it's not a straightforward process in any case but creating documents that look like Donald Knuth dashed them off in 1978. Pandoc is super flexible but your output goes through LaTeX templates so customizing them felt out of reach given my limited time--until now.

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Here is another one that prefers markdown with pandoc.

IMHO, it's much better to use markdown generally and insert latex only when it is completely necessary.

A latex usage example is creating a tikz picture or for introducing \pagebreak or \framebreak in pdfs or beamer presentations.

For the rest of the cases, markdown is much less verbose and can accomplish the same.

I used pandoc to generate latex from markdown while studying philosophy in graduate school, I even came up with a little executable tarball that generated a directory structure in the the way I wanted, with a shell script to handle building everything properly.

I find that this route is best for documents that you are writing: you can focus on the content and use a nice markdown editor like Ulysses without having to worry too much about formatting.

On the other hand, when I'm trying to typeset a pre-existing text for reading/distribution, I find it a lot easier to copy and paste the text into a latex template and then tweak it incrementally until everything looks the way I want it to.

I also use Pandoc to convert markdown to latex. Markdown expressed the content clearest.

I've also started generated latex PDFs via the Jupiter notebook. They have a quick and easy preview, plus markdown + latex math + code integration that's easy.

I very much like the idea of markdown-pandoc-latex-pdf toolchain (I use markdown for all non-math stuff), but setting up a math LaTeX template that works for anything other than the most basic documents was a pain, so I gave up.

Is there some good ready-made templates around one could try without too much hassle?

There is also this pandoc extension called schlolarly markdown that has some nice features

http://scholarlymarkdown.com/Scholarly-Markdown-Guide.html

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