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Comment by JelteF | Hacker News Reader

I've switched from writing latex to writing pandoc markdown. I then convert it to latex and then to pdf. This gets the same result as latex, but is much easier to type for common stuff like, sections, emphasis and verbatim. It also allows you to type "&" symbols anywhere.

When I require "advanced" stuff like tables and figures you can easily fallback to inline latex commands within you're markdown. It really is a significant improvement over plain latex and I haven't looked back.

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Excellent idea!

Here is a blog post which covers the same approach with examples, templates, etc:

Easy LaTeX with Markdown and Pandoc http://tech.lauritz.me/easy-latex-with-markdown-pandoc/

This is how I wrote my dissertation. I recommend it. I recommend it even though it meant I wasn't able to use Word's "Track Changes" with my advisor. Nice guy, but he wasn't going to learn Git to humor me. PDF annotations were a good enough middle ground. In the end I was glad that there was a barrier between his edits and my source -- like most academics, he tossed off his edits in a blazing hurry, and I was able to avoid some distracting changes in voice because I was typing them in myself.

I use a pandoc to generate HTML presentations in a similar way. Throw the whole thing in git and you versioned all your presentations.

In theory I could also generate the same presentations in PDF, but I sprinkled some inline HTML where needed, which would have to be converted to inline latex.

Pandoc also has a plugin system which I use to automatically convert inline graphiz graphs to png.

> you can easily fallback to inline latex commands within [your] markdown

How? This sounds like a very nice middle ground between easy formatting and advanced features.

By just writing it like normal LaTeX. Once you write \somecommand it will interpret it as latex. See the link one of your sibling comments posted for an example: http://tech.lauritz.me/easy-latex-with-markdown-pandoc/

If you have LaTeX installed pandoc will interpret the inline latex when converting to pdf.

I have significant LaTeX experience and yet I do the same. Write in markdown using a good editor (I like Ulysses), then use pandoc to typeset using a custom LaTeX style file.

Yeah, I would definitely say I have significant LaTeX experience as well and use a lot of fancy packages. Using pandoc doesn't take away any of the power of LaTeX. It just makes common things easier.

Even when using only LaTeX, I still find the edit/compile/view cycle annoying compared to WYSYWIG. How much of a delay to this cycle does using pandoc add?

Pandoc doesn't add much, the compilation from markdown to latex is quite fast. The LaTeX compilation still takes most of the time, especially when having to run it multiple times because of references and cross references.

When starting with LaTeX I found myself compiling all the time.

I then realized that I cannot do much anyway and ended up writing text all the time and compiling one in a while to admire the work.

With Word I keep adding empty lines, reformatting, etc.

I've been looking for something like Pandoc for a while, great tip!

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