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Comment by blutack | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of tooling like this but not for only making websites?

I have an asciidoc based chain that mostly works for generating both PDF manuals and standalone html docs but it's a bit of a faff to install and set up especially for non-technical users.

My dream is something like pandoc but with one or more diagram libraries integrated, native PDF output and all wrapped up in a single binary, maybe with a nice web UI/editor built into the binary. Oh, and if it could manage multiple documents and versioning that would be great too. Looking for a Fossil SCM kind of feel?

Closest thing I've used would probably be LyX but that's almost too capable!

I do appreciate this is a really hard thing to do and I'm wondering what toolchains other people are using?

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Emacs org-mode with babel for executing code blocks to generate the diagrams prior to exporting to html/pdf is my flow for this. It still has a steeper learning curve for non-technical users, but if you use post-commit hooks you can have people just make changes that way and let the scripts do the work.

Have you checked out Quarto? https://quarto.org

"Quarto® is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc

- Create dynamic content with Python, R, Julia, and Observable.

- Author documents as plain text markdown or Jupyter notebooks.

- Publish high-quality articles, reports, presentations, websites, blogs, and books in HTML, PDF, MS Word, ePub, and more.

- Author with scientific markdown, including equations, citations, crossrefs, figure panels, callouts, advanced layout, and more."

Does that sound like it meets your needs?

A few folks recommended Quarto to me when I asked about current recommendations recently. My main goal is physical books and that doesn't seem to be a first class citizen anywhere. Looking through Quarto, I can't find reference to markdown syntax for index entries (which indicates that they don't support it.)

Also, I'm heavily biased, but based on my experience I will need to hack whatever tool and I'm not really interested in hacking JS/TS. (My whole reason for getting rid of my rst based tooling is to simplify and sticking in Python simplifies my life, coding in JS/TS not so much.)

I'm also very interested in physical books. Can you point me to anything that supports index entries well, regardless of the language they are written in?

I certainly agree about expecting to need to hack, whatever the tool.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I've published multiple books using rst2nitrile. For example, Effective Pandas was written with it...

Bookdown seems to support index entries:

https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/latex-index.html

I wouldn't be surprised if Quarto supports the same syntax, since they are related. But it is possible it doesn't.

It might. I'm not interested in hacking R.

I'd be very interested in seeing your markdown (pandoc filter) based solution, if you can publish it.

I got kinda intimidated with the Asciidoc toolchain that I instead just wrote a bit of Clojure to call the Java AsciidocJ API. A tiny script that did what I want (make Reveal slides) and it's simple/straightforward and I guess crossplatform :)

So better than even a command line thing

If you want a GUI then I'm guessing AsciidocFx

https://github.com/asciidocfx/AsciidocFX

(haven't tried it myself)

There is also Orgmode and Texmacs - but I don't really like that the markup is kinda "locked" to an editor. For instance I've done stuff with Orgmode for ages, but it breaks between Emacs major versions and you can't really export it without having Emacs. I also feel like I'm in effect locked into the platform

Texmacs actually looks fantastic, but I'm nervous putting all my beans in that basket

Pandoc filters and templates can be used to create complex, replicable workflows like this.

If you want to generate diagrams using pandoc, there are filters that will do that for you.

I dream of a UI for authoring pandoc ASTs ... someday I'll sit down and make it!

I've created a VS Code extension that provides a live Pandoc preview with scroll sync and support for executing code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=gpoore.c.... Adding support for diagrams would just be a matter of creating a config file specifying the diagram executable and command-line options.

Last week I ported my static physical book building tooling from rst-based [0] to markdown (pandoc filter) based.

I've used my rst tooling to publish many books (like Effective Pandas) and am wanting to drop rst in an effort to simplify my life. My pandoc toolchain is not in github yet, but preliminary exploration validates that I can publish my next physical book with it (with things like front matter, indices, etc).

In the process I messed around with MyST and mistletoe. I dropped MyST because it was evident I would need to mess around with Sphinx again. Been there done that. Too much abstraction.

Mistletoe would have worked too (I need to create custom fences/markup for a few features) but I wanted to see if I could do it with Pandoc.

The Pandoc distinction between Blocks and Inlines is annoying as is the requirement to handle everything at once. With Pandoc, you only get notified at the start of an element, not the end which probably complicates it a bit more than Mistletoe would have.

(I still need to port my slide generation tooling and will probably use mistletoe for that. For epub generation I think I will stick with Pandoc.)

0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2nitrile

Typora includes diagram supports and export to PDF. It costs $15 with a free trial, but it's worth every penny.

Obsidian.md is amazing; basically an OS for markdown.

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