Pandoc 3.0

In principle, it should be possible to create a PDF preview with proper SyncTeX support for synchronizing LaTeX source and PDF preview locations, but that gets complicated when Pandoc+LaTeX generate the PDF. It may be best to leave LaTeX-PDF previews to dedicated LaTeX previewers that don't involve Pandoc.

For HN reading along, SetApp is a way to distribute apps and get paid outside the app store. Really, that exists.

// Disclosure: Unless you are disavowing your ability as author to offer a recommendation that can be trusted, you probably mean "Disclosure" not "Disclaimer". Disclosure = here is my potential bias. Disclaimer = YMMV, no warranties express or implied.

The table formatting is not good enough. It's not obvious how to left-justify a column. It's also not clear how to line a column up along "." (which I often use for numbers). Both of these are fairly easy in LaTeX.

The outputted LaTeX looks OK, but it's not obvious how to format -- most journals, and Universities (for PhDs) will have a fixed style you have to use. I suppose I could take the LaTeX and randomly hack it, but then I need to learn LaTeX to fix any issues that causes.

* It's not running on Linux. Nobody in our department runs windows or mac.

* We already have huge BibTex citation libraries that we use in papers and just reference the necessary papers. These citation library files grow and grow. I won't manually add citations for each paper.

* We collaborate and version through git. If collaborative writing and version control does not work at least as easy as our plaintext-git-handling, that's a hard no.

* You do know that for conference or journal submission word and LaTeX templates with given page limits in these templates are given, right? How would I use, say, LNCS in MonsterWriter? Writing seems not to be page-based. How do I know that I'm over the limit?

* My wife is a researcher in the social sciences, and they extensively use MS Word's change tracking and merging feature to write papers. If MonsterWriter does not support this in an accessible and visually appealing manner, it would be a hard no for her as well.

With your feature set, you're not really targeting researchers, even if you think you do.

I would believe the same goes for our own research static analysis and autotrading platform (in our case SQL) which probably every CS department also has quite a few of.

I wouldn't put my hopes up for anything publicly available that fits your platform and has a bus factor higher than 1.

    pandoc --shift-heading-level-by=-1 input.md -o output.docx

https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#extension-smart

The meaning of the -smart extension on option names is inverted in some cases, and enabled by default on markdown output.

That's part of the joy of using Pandoc. I can pipeline it, no problem.

Like this:

cf. https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite/blob/master/bin/templ...

  cat "${watch_dir}/sources/${url_slug}" |
      __shite_templating_compile_source_to_html ${file_type} |
      __shite_templating_wrap_content_html ${content_type} ${watch_dir} |
      __shite_templating_wrap_page_html \
          > "${watch_dir}/public/${html_url_slug}"

  shite_template_common_default_page() {
      local maybe_page_id=${shite_page_data[page_id]:+"id=\"${shite_page_data[page_id]}\""}
      local maybe_canonical_url=${shite_page_data[canonical_url]:+"<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"${shite_page_data[canonical_url]}\">"}
  
      cat <<EOF
  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html lang="en">
      <head>
          $(shite_template_common_meta)
          $(shite_template_common_links)
          ${maybe_canonical_url}
      </head>
      <body ${maybe_page_id}>
        <div id="the-very-top" class="stack center box">
            $(shite_template_common_header)
            <main id="main">
              $(cat -)
            </main>
            $(shite_template_common_footer)
        </div>
      </body>
  </html>
  EOF
  }

This is nebulous. Haskell's compiled binaries are not ideal, for a number of reasons.[^1] GHC does very little to optimise for many typical metrics of "efficient". The binaries it produces are enormous because it (unavoidably) bundles the runtime along with the program itself, and there is a lot of empty space in the binaries. Shrinking them can improve startup times significantly especially on spinning rust drives.

That said, Haskell programs are at least _compiled_, and they do result in binaries which, if well written, can result in running times comparable to (or, sometimes, shorter than) your average hand-rolled C code that achieves the same goals.

Of course, none of this casts any shadow on the fact that Pandoc is, indeed, an excellently engineered piece of software that stands as a testament to the value of Haskell for real-world business logic and problem solving.

[^1]: This problem is fairly well-understood in the Haskell community: https://dixonary.co.uk/small

Seems there's a long-standing (for the project) open issue where it's still being mulled over.

Imports are also very nice for writing longer texts--especially how AsciiDoc lets you +1 all of your headings so the heading hierarchy works as a standalone document and a part of a larger whole.