Pandoc Templates

Pandoc is such an amazing piece of software. I used it to format my novel and made it part of a GitHub action to produce all the formats I required. I wasn't aware of templates, but some look really sleek.

I keep thinking that modern text editors are just flawed and markdown, with all its downsides and limitations, is what 99% is the people need.

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abyssin 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You may be overestimating technical abilities of 99% of the people. I tried to convert some to pandoc and failed miserably. Personally I love it, markdown is becoming more and more central to my workflows.

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adamddev1 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Haskell thriving in the wild!

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maxerickson an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

For the short, simple documents that most people make, a versioned, wysiwyg word processor is going to beat everything else.

I mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.

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troyvit 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Building my resume in a wysiwyg editor was an exercise in frustration. Formatting was inconsistent, they were only searchable from inside the editor and versioning was useless because diff had no meaning.

My markdown resume has its own problems but having this level of control has been a huge load off my mind.

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limagnolia 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

For most of the short simple documents I create, I don't want to redo the formating for every document. Simply writing it in something simple like Markdown ( possibly a markdown wysiwig editor) and having my software automatically apply appropriate standard formats to it is ideal.

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maxerickson 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

Right, most people don't want to do that, they want the burden of applying styles to the couple headings or whatever.

Unfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.

	▲	sgc 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Agreed. There is actually a lot better control in openoffice / libreoffice than most people know. You just have to set up your styles and be systematic about (virtually) never using direct formatting, instead always applying a pre-configured style. There is a distinct value in seeing your final product as you work, when the final product is visual.

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FailMore 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve been building something somewhat adjacent to this. It’s https://sdocs.dev. It’s as 100% private browser based Markdown renderer

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wodenokoto 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve been looking for a template to use for fancy business reports, so I can do my stuff in R/Python/QMD and management can get something colorful to look at without me having to copy paste everything into PowerPoint

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chlaunchla 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pandoc is an impressive piece of software but I could never quite get PDF generation working nicely with it.

Table layouts were often broken, with text overlapping into adjacent fields. Unicode font fallback didn't work properly, with characters like "→" being silently dropped because they didn't exist in the main font. Having predictable control of page breaks, to avoid situations where header text didn't stick to the following paragraph and instead had header and paragraph text split over a page boundary, was pretty much impossible.

I ended up concluding that Markdown isn't a sufficiently powerful markup language for page-based documents, and went back to using Word in all its WYSIWYG delight.

That said, maybe there were ways of doing all of the above but I couldn't figure it out and found the whole process of wrestling with with both Markdown and LaTeX templates, and Pandoc configuration, unintuitive and annoying.

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thibaut_barrere 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Somehow related is https://www.metanorma.org/ (using Markdown to produce norms-compatible outputs).

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falsaberN1 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh wow, I use Pandoc fairly extensively, and have my own templates, and I never knew you could make things as colorful as some of these.

Oh no, inspiration has arrived. Guess I know what I'm wasting my weekend into, hah.

Also this page seems to have existed for a while and I never heard of it! I'm glad I stumbled upon this. A lot of nice ideas here.

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abyssin 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[delayed]

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submeta 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am a heavy user of Pandoc. As I write all my text in markdown using Obsidian, but have to create content for the MS Office environment, I use Pandoc to convert my markdown content into ms office formated content.

I would be lost had I have to use the Office tools to edit and format my text.

So thank you to all the maintainers of Pandoc.

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ltrg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I used it to output my doctoral thesis in LaTeX from Markdown 10 years ago, and similarly for going back and forth between my supervisor's Word documents and the main thesis text.

Embarrassingly, a horrible little script for converting Pandoc's Markdown endnotes to inline format remains my most-starred GitHub repo: https://github.com/ltrgoddard/inliner/

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maxerickson an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Basic familiarity with the paragraph styles in Word is like a 20 minute task.

If you are using markdown, you already understand the conceptual basis for it, so you just need to understand how it's implemented over there.

I'm not arguing that it is something you should do, just rolling my eyes at "I would be lost".

	▲	submeta an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not lost because it's hard to learn, but because I don't like writing in ms office products. It's not just word, I write formated long emails in outlook as well.

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ntnsndr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have been relying on pandoc for many years and had no idea I could use templates like this, which I suppose is pathetic but also indicates just how powerful the defaults are on their own.

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djyde an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've always wanted to make a GUI client for pandoc

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raffael_de 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

2 hours, 56 points and not a single comment?

	▲	RadiozRadioz 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps people are quasi-bookmarking it