I used to use pandoc for my bachelors papers, which needed to be submitted as word documents. I never used templates but had a rather large "one-liner" pandoc command to convert my markdown files.
At the time I'd not got round to understanding the yaml front matter etc. I even user Zettlr for a while [0].
I then discovered quarto [1] and this changed everything. Much nicer experience. I used this for my masters papers.
I think the tooling around pandoc is what makes it such a good tool. I remember attempting restructured text and latex and having a right hard time.
I don't even know what magic buttons I need to push to get that template to correctly inherit the table format I wanted from pandoc, but it does. I tend to have other scripts though for more complicated tables though. So if I want a table to have a certain row highlighted a different color, I would write a Powershell script to run after the table was generated.
I was never able to figure out how to use LibreOffice to insert the table of contents and then export to PDF (although I can do it via the GUI).
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.
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.
You should be aware that pandoc markdown has extensive non-standard additions to the language to make it usable.
If you want a pure markup language that is simple, plain text readable and able to produce text more complex than what a type writer could manage in 1920 then restructured text is the way to go.
pandoc has infinitely many devices for including various commands. A lua filter - to take one standard example - can manage basically anything you cook up. The going AIs can write them for you and your triggering syntax at the drop of a hat. Inter alia, you can write your restructured text in markdown and include bits like this.
Here is normal Pandoc Markdown text.
```{=rst}
.. note::
This is a native reStructuredText directive!
Pandoc will not parse or change this text.
It goes straight to the rST output writer.
```
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.
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.
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.
I'm a programmer and even I like writing in a non-programmable environment. Programming in the document system just stimulates the more primitive parts of my brain that love the processing and programming more than the writing itself. So it's distracting in that way.
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.
"→" is standard unicode; pandoc would have put it into the internal AST. If you were writing a pdf e.g. via pdflatex and tex fonts in olden times, a number of things might have gone wrong. Such a thing will pass unproblematically into the things like the going luatex - but similarly if you write the pdf via e.g. typst or one of the other engines.
It is true one ends up familiarizing oneself with peculiarities of the typesetting engine. The LLMs are lately teaching me bits and pieces about typst and typst+pandoc which I'm using for a writing project. They all seem infallible about pandoc curiosa.
Tables I agree are a nightmare in any plain text representation whatsoever - except with editor support which alas Word makes easy.
Use Pandoc w/ Typst. I've published many books using it.
In fact, just had a friend with a traditionally published book who is now self-pubbing ask me yesterday about my tools. I recommended Pandoc and Typst. He (surprisingly to me) had never heard of Typst, but within the hour replied that (with the use of AI) he had a great-looking template for the book. (Try doing that with LaTeX).
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
Pandoc can be a bit painful to set up, but once it’s in your workflow, it’s hard to replace. Especially when you care about repeatable formatting and multiple outputs.
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.
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.
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/
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.
At the time I'd not got round to understanding the yaml front matter etc. I even user Zettlr for a while [0].
I then discovered quarto [1] and this changed everything. Much nicer experience. I used this for my masters papers.
I think the tooling around pandoc is what makes it such a good tool. I remember attempting restructured text and latex and having a right hard time.
[0] https://zettlr.com/ [1] https://quarto.org/
Quarto is my documentation tool.
For me, they are both massively used, but cover different usages.
I don't even know what magic buttons I need to push to get that template to correctly inherit the table format I wanted from pandoc, but it does. I tend to have other scripts though for more complicated tables though. So if I want a table to have a certain row highlighted a different color, I would write a Powershell script to run after the table was generated.
I was never able to figure out how to use LibreOffice to insert the table of contents and then export to PDF (although I can do it via the GUI).
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.
If you want a pure markup language that is simple, plain text readable and able to produce text more complex than what a type writer could manage in 1920 then restructured text is the way to go.
Here is normal Pandoc Markdown text.
```{=rst} .. note:: This is a native reStructuredText directive! Pandoc will not parse or change this text. It goes straight to the rST output writer. ```
Back to normal Markdown text.
I mean, they don't want to think about building the output, never mind controlling the process.
My markdown resume has its own problems but having this level of control has been a huge load off my mind.
Unfortunately, most people don't use paragraph styles, but if you do, it's a couple clicks.
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.
It is true one ends up familiarizing oneself with peculiarities of the typesetting engine. The LLMs are lately teaching me bits and pieces about typst and typst+pandoc which I'm using for a writing project. They all seem infallible about pandoc curiosa.
Tables I agree are a nightmare in any plain text representation whatsoever - except with editor support which alas Word makes easy.
In fact, just had a friend with a traditionally published book who is now self-pubbing ask me yesterday about my tools. I recommended Pandoc and Typst. He (surprisingly to me) had never heard of Typst, but within the hour replied that (with the use of AI) he had a great-looking template for the book. (Try doing that with LaTeX).
I have some custom filters for index entries and code formatting.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1664049/can-i-force-a-pa...
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.
https://typst.app/docs/web-app/export-and-preview/
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.
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/
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".