Pandoc for TeXnicians [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Pandoc for TeXnicians [pdf]

tug.org

53 pointsmarbu11 comments

This is a talk given by John MacFarlane, author and maintainer of pandoc, during TUG 2020 conference. Video recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9uZJFO54iM

I have a love hate relationship with Pandoc. So many amazing powerful features and so many gaps that seem obvious to fill but just arbitrarily ruled out of scope and never going to happen (example: underline!).

There is an "Underline" type in pandoc's definition (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/pandoc-types-1.22/docs/T...). In Pandoc's format, this works like:

    This word is [underlined]{.ul}.

To be fair, underlined text is generally frowned upon as a " workaround for shortcomings in typewriter technology" [1,2]. Moreover, the underline nowadays is very tightly coupled with hyperlinks. Personally, seeing some underlined text that's not a hyperlink would really surprise me.

[1]: https://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html

[2]: https://lawriwilliamson.wordpress.com/tag/bad-typography/

IIRC, at least in France, we're taught to underline book names when referencing them in a document. I think my teachers used to make me do that in writing as well ^^

> “Oh come on! Everyone underlines links!” Some who don’t: the New York Times, New York magazine, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, Google, Amazon, Apple, GitHub, and Wikipedia. Even eBay, paragon of ’90s website design, has relented. Are underlined links dead? Maybe not quite. Dying? For sure.

I don't know when this paragraph was written, but right now checking the first four on that list (New York Times, New York magazine, the Washington Post, Bloomberg) all publications underline links in the bodies of their articles.

Yes, that last paragraph did not age well. I think that by now, not using underline for hyperlinks is becoming just as bad as using it for emphasis.

No matter what might be added to fill in these gaps, you will always need something more. The brilliance of Pandoc is that it provides a framework for you to construct any markup language you need by writing filters. And for HTML output, you don’t even need to write a filter; you can just use ad-hoc classes and create the result you want in CSS.

Here are some demos from the website. I especially like number 13 and 14, markdown to PDF examples.

https://pandoc.org/demos.html

See https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/User-contributed-template... for more

If anybody is interested for a quick start in this, I made a template [1] to make slides in markdown and converting them to PDF using pandoc.

[1]: https://github.com/e-dorigatti/pandoc_beamer_template

Reply on news.ycombinator.com