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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Eisvogel template is a fantastic way to use Latex without knowing much about it, by transforming your markdown with Pandoc, mind you i used it before LLMs existed, but it was great to turn the notes of a project of a tesis into a super pro formated version without learning Latex.
To me, Pandoc is "never have to touch Word again", in other _words_, salvation.
Sadly, the .docx templates aren't enough - they have the styling, but for those forced to produce a .docx output as a necessity for "corporate" consumption - you will find it that it's not quite straightforward to insert a title page, and out of the reference docx file, only the styles are used, not the content. You can define headers and footers in the reference file, but not more than that.
As of 3.2.1, Pandoc supports OpenXML template files for its docx writer as well as pre and post body insertion: --template, --include-before-body and --include-after-body, but if you prefer to define your title page in Word, or haven't gotten your head around doing an OpenXML thing like me, I found this Windows tool:
You can define your title page in one docx file and then merge it with Pandoc's output. But since styles from both get merged, it's best to start your title page with a copy of your reference and/or delete as many styles as possible from your title page so you don't have to make changes to both.
There are also some other quirks like fitting tables to contents properly in docx - a workaround is a PowerShell script (shock, horror), that opens the file, iterates over tables, sets autofit and saves the document.
Doing "Werd" right: edit markdown, type "make". -> docx, pdf. The world is a good place sometimes.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 41.4 ms ] threadI keep thinking that modern text editors are just flawed and markdown, with all its downsides and limitations, is what 99% is the people need.
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.
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.
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.
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/
Sadly, the .docx templates aren't enough - they have the styling, but for those forced to produce a .docx output as a necessity for "corporate" consumption - you will find it that it's not quite straightforward to insert a title page, and out of the reference docx file, only the styles are used, not the content. You can define headers and footers in the reference file, but not more than that.
As of 3.2.1, Pandoc supports OpenXML template files for its docx writer as well as pre and post body insertion: --template, --include-before-body and --include-after-body, but if you prefer to define your title page in Word, or haven't gotten your head around doing an OpenXML thing like me, I found this Windows tool:
https://github.com/jamessantiago/DocxMerge
You can define your title page in one docx file and then merge it with Pandoc's output. But since styles from both get merged, it's best to start your title page with a copy of your reference and/or delete as many styles as possible from your title page so you don't have to make changes to both.
There are also some other quirks like fitting tables to contents properly in docx - a workaround is a PowerShell script (shock, horror), that opens the file, iterates over tables, sets autofit and saves the document.
Doing "Werd" right: edit markdown, type "make". -> docx, pdf. The world is a good place sometimes.