Pandoc

Created: Apr 13, 2020 by Pradeep Gowda Updated: Mar 18, 2024 Tagged: markdown · pandoc

Pandoc is a program that converts between various text markup formats.

Pandoc allows you to customise the output via extensive command line arguments and by templates.

My projects related to Pandoc

• Semantic CSS for Pandoc – an attempt at finding and using various semantic Cascading Style Sheets with Pandoc’d default HTML rendering.

Guides on using Pandoc to write books

• This guide on how to setup pandoc to write fiction by Eugene Kiss is a very good introduction to using pandoc to produce print-ready material.
• words by Steve Klabnik.

Editors

• Build an Amazing Markdown Editor Using Visual Studio Code and Pandoc | thisDaveJ
• PanWriter Markdown editor for macOS, Windows and Linux.

Customising pandoc

These are some of the examples of users customising pandoc to output LaTeX, HTML to their taste and requirements.

• github.com/smile/pandoc-templates
• github.com/claes/pandoc-templates
• github.com/kjhealy/pandoc-templates
• pandoc academic publication
• IEEE Pandoc template by cscorley – is what i used for writing a IEEE style paper.
• Typesetting automation · A plain-text workflow for painless production of personal documents & offline correspondence—featuring Pandoc, LaTeX, and a simple makefile
• a makefile for pandoc
• msprev/panzer: pandoc + styles
• Heer de Beer.org—Pandocomatic “… is a tool to re-use these common configurations by specifying a so-called pandocomatic template in a YAML configuration file.”

My own attempts are here:

• github.com/btbytes/dotpandoc

Book templates

• https://github.com/btbytes/pandoc-ebook-template an updated fork of https://notabug.org/kmac/pandoc-ebook-template

Filters

Pandoc filters can be written in Haskell which modify the document structure programmatically. These are some of the user written filters that are instructive:

• pandoc-emphasize-code – “A Pandoc filter for emphasizing code in fenced blocks.”
• bitbucket.org/mpastell/pandoc-filters
• pandoc-reference-filter – This pandoc filter implements an internal reference manager for pandoc, making it possible to reference images and sections that have attribute tags.
• Aditya Mahajan shows how to use gpp preprocessor to include source code files
• baig/pandoc-csv2table: A Pandoc filter that renders CSV as Pandoc Markdown Tables.
• Panflute: pandoc filters made simple — panflute 1.9.7 documentation
• CSV Tables in Markdown — Pandoc Filter for CSV Tables
• PP - A generic Preprocessor (with Pandoc in mind)

Exporters

Ox-pandoc is an exporter that translates Org-mode file to various other formats via Pandoc.

Markdown to InDesign; Pandoc now ships with a writer able to produce an ICML file from any Pandoc-supported input file format.13 ICML is the document format of Adobe InCopy; Dec 2015.

Books written using pandoc

• The little Redis book
• My own attempts at converting Chuck Moore’s Programming a Problem-oriented language into a “book” using pandoc and some elbow grease. The result is available on github - https://github.com/btbytes/pol
• littleosbook – “The little book about OS development”. Outputs HTML and PDF.
• Customizing pandoc to generate beautiful pdfs from markdown | learnbyexample
• beejjorgensen/bgipc: Beej’s Guide to Unix Interprocess Communication source

See also

• Laika – Text Markup Transformer for sbt and Scala applications, transforming Markdown and reStructuredText to HTML and PDF
• lise-henry/crowbook – converts books written in Markdown to HTML, LaTeX/PDF and EPUB.
• Gotenberg · A Docker-powered stateless API for converting HTML, Markdown and Office documents to PDF.

Styling

• jez/pandoc-sidenote: Convert Pandoc Markdown-style footnotes into sidenotes
• panam stylesheet for pandoc
• cysouw/toc-css: Pandoc Lua Filter to add table of contents to the side

Sites built using Pandoc

• Openresty.org uses Pandoc, makefile and perl.
• website/make at master · kisslinux/website

Book publishing

• The Tools I Use To Write Books - Thorsten Ball
• Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim — Vladimir Keleshev
• Technical Writing with Pandoc and Panflute

Using with weasyprint

From an HN thread:

It’s even possible to replace (Xe)LaTeX with weasy, a Python HTML-to-PDF converter. It supports two-colums via CSS, automatic CSS hypens, CSS page counters and embedding SVGs. I just needed an HTML header with CSS in the markdown file.

$ pandoc --filter pandoc-citeproc --csl ieee.csl --bibliography=paper.bib --smart --normalize -f markdown+multiline_tables+inline_notes -t html5 -V margin-top:0.5in -V margin-bottom:0.5in -V margin-left:0.5in -V margin-right:0.5in -o output.html input.md
$ python3 -c "from weasyprint import HTML; HTML('output.html').write_pdf('output.pdf', presentational_hints=True)"

For LaTeX-style math equations I added mathjax-pandoc-filter as filter to the pandoc args:

--filter ~/node_modules/.bin/mathjax-pandoc-filter -Mmathjax.centerDisplayMath -Mmathjax.noInlineSVG