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Comment by gpoore | Hacker News Reader

I've been frustrated by Markdown previews not supporting Pandoc features, so I created a Pandoc-based Markdown preview for VS Code [1]. The preview supports all Pandoc extensions to Markdown syntax, because Pandoc itself generates the preview. There is also optional support for code execution with Jupyter kernels. I'm currently in the process of adding support for non-Markdown formats (including scroll sync), plus taking advantage of some of the new Pandoc 3.0 features.

[1]: Examples and animations: https://codebraid.org/presentations/scipy2022/. Installation for VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=gpoore.c.... Installation for VSCodium: https://open-vsx.org/extension/gpoore/codebraid-preview.

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Funny. During my bachelor thesis I added Pandoc as a renderer to an Atom markdown preview extension. (instead of actually writing my thesis)

https://github.com/atom-community/markdown-preview-plus/pull...

Old is new, the editor and the extension are now defunct. What was best about this exercise, I got so well versed with the markdown and Pandoc features at the time, that I didn’t need the preview at all.

The release 3.0 is unusable on windows. When running pandoc —version, it spawns off many instances and won’t return the value. Anyone has encountered such an issue?

Does that mean that you are adding support for latex etc?

this is awesome, thank you for your work.

Yes, I'm adding support for arbitrary text-based formats, including LaTeX. So it will be possible to write LaTeX and see a live HMTL preview generated by Pandoc.

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.

> Yes, I'm adding support for arbitrary text-based formats

That would be extremely powerful, and also would allow you to differentiate your extension from the Quarto one.

I actually released my extension around the same time that the Quarto extension came out. Quarto is great for documents running R code or needing some of Quarto's advanced document features. My extension has scroll sync and the preview updates live while you type. If you need code execution, you can use multiple Jupyter kernels per document and execute inline code. Also, code execution is non-blocking, so the preview still updates when you type, and code output appears live as it becomes available.

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