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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

Does it still automatically generate "smart" quotes (which are anything but) from traditional ones during conversion?

Love the tool, but this is the most awful default setting I've seen in a program in a while, especially if you include any code that depends on quotes not being mangled.

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If you specify that you just want bog-standard markdown then it will not generate smart quotes. To wit:

- `pandoc foo.tex -t markdown foo.md` will not produce smart quotes.

- `pandoc foo.tex -t markdown-smart foo.md` will produce smart quotes.

I think the examples you give might be the opposite of what happens - in the docs:

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.

This I agree with. I don't know the exact current status, but having debugged related rendering issues many times over the years, I wish it had always been hard to enable conversion to so-called smart quotes, rather than hard to prevent it.

I should add: the above is about the only quibble I can think of, which is impressive. I love love love pandoc! It's a highly dependable and capable swiss army docs tool. I use it constantly, eg to help generate CLI help text and HTML, man, info and plain text manuals from (mostly) markdown sources. Huge congrats and thanks to the developers for their hard work and for this latest release.

It’s configurable, and, in any case, Pandoc will not alter the quotes in your code blocks nor in inline code.

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