A couple of cool things about pandoc:<p>1. It's a tool built in large part by folks involved in the humanities. John, of course, is a professor of philosophy. (We could stop there, since his contributions so outnumber all the others, but I'll go on...) I'm an assistant prof. of English. It has large contributions from the curator of medieval manuscripts at the British Library, and contributions from a historian as well. And those are just the ones that come to mind -- I'm sure there are others. It's cool to have a tool used by many folks in the humanities, but also in large part driven by their needs.<p>2. John is a great project lead, and it's an amazingly open project. If you're interested in getting started with haskell, the filters API allows you to really adapt it to your needs. And if you're interested in adding another reader or writer, there's a good chance it can be added.<p>For myself, I started out using the python docx library, found it didn't handle enough stuff, wrote one myself (covering mainly my conversion needs, not creation) and had it output JSON that pandoc could read. When that worked, I ported it to haskell, and posted it to the mailing list. Within a few weeks, the docx reader was part of the program. It's been a great experience -- both in using haskell, and in playing a significant role in a program I use and love.
Pandoc has made the recent push for reproducible research across the sciences possible (via Rmarkdown/knitr and IPython/Jupyter) --- it's an essential part of solving a pretty big epistemological problem!<p>(For me, it's also a large part of solving my own productivity problems.)<p>It's also driven markdown itself to become more feature rich and internally consistent. I'm extremely appreciative of JGM's efforts to product a unified markdown spec[^1].<p>Huge thanks, John!<p>[^1]: <a href="http://commonmark.org/" rel="nofollow">http://commonmark.org/</a>
Happy birthday, Pandoc!<p>Pandoc is a key component in my Markdown-to-Kindle-and-Paperback pipeline. In fact I've soft-published an article about it: <a href="https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-and-published-my-novel-using-only-open-source-tools-5cdfbd7c00ca" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-and-publishe...</a><p>Amazing piece of software. Not that often a tool dominates an use case so thoroughly that there are virtually no alternatives, because there really is no need. Thank you, John MacFarlane :)
Thanks to Pandoc, I never need to use Microsoft Word at work. If someone wants me to upload some documentation to Sharepoint, I just write it in Markdown and convert to docx with Pandoc. Wonderful piece of software.
What an amazing project! I use it all the time, for converting between textile (redmine) and markdown (everything else), and also for extracting my company's proposals from Google Drive, and converting them to latex and PDF with our customized template. The code for this is all here: <a href="https://github.com/dergachev/gdocs-export" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dergachev/gdocs-export</a><p>Thanks so much to it's creators and contributors!
I love the markdown to PDF converter using embedded LaTeX for math expressions. So much easier than writing pure LaTeX and you still get a beautiful result.
I have started using pandoc again recently since thier org support has gotten a lot better in recent months. Using emacs, it is not a very hard decision to use org mode over markdown or rst.<p>With org support in pandoc, i no longer have to start up emacs to generate HTML for my website, so doing that in batches just got a lot easier.
Great project. Have written my whole thesis in Markdown thanks to Pandoc (+Sublime+Latex+Zotero) and this great template <a href="https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown</a>
Happy birthday!<p>Pandoc is one of those things that I only recently discovered and totally fell in love with: I wrote a bunch of code in literate Haskell for work, so that I could have the logic right, and then ported it to JS to reduce the bus factor of the project. When I discovered pandoc I just ran it on my literate Haskell and the resulting PDF was so beautiful I had to print it out and tack it up on a cubicle wall, like a "this is what they pay me for" type of reminder.
I love Pandoc! Thank you, [John MacFarlane](<a href="http://johnmacfarlane.net/" rel="nofollow">http://johnmacfarlane.net/</a>)!
Happy Birthday Pandoc!<p>The ability to write and collaborate on memos in markdown, and turn them into fancy PDFs and .docs is seriously world changing.
It feels redundant to say this with all the others expressing the same thoughts, but thank you thank you thank you John et al for Pandoc. It's been life-changing since running into it a few years back.<p>I do a lot of work researching older and historical documents. Some of these are available in only scans, meaning image-heavy PDFs, or rotten OCR transcriptions. Occasionally I get lucky and find a solid ASCII source.<p>A recent case in point, Dugald Stewart's 1793 "Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith", which I'd found in ASCII format.<p>A couple hours (mostly of finessing the markup) to pandoc, and I had a 72 page PDF, ePub, and HTML versions, the former two posted online.<p><a href="https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/-h-b6ek6segi8eamq2g6vq" rel="nofollow">https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/-h-b6ek6segi8eamq2g6vq</a><p>ASCII Source: <a href="http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/dugald" rel="nofollow">http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/duga...</a><p>Markdown: <a href="http://pastebin.com/LdKXpHdR" rel="nofollow">http://pastebin.com/LdKXpHdR</a><p>PDF: <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPY0tfaXlQWUNwLWc/view?usp=drivesdk" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPY0tfaXlQWUNwLWc...</a><p>ePub: <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPdXgwcm1NbDhQdEE/view?usp=drivesdk" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Q6JFf-mAJPdXgwcm1NbDhQdEE...</a><p>(The Google Drive docs <i>should</i> be world-readable.)<p>That's only one of many docs I've fixed up using Pandoc.
A huge thanks to John and all the contributors.<p>What's most amazing is it's ability to generate beautiful outputs (for printing, viewing, presentations alike). Awesome.
Using it all the time and love it.<p>The only issue I had though is that it does not convert certain charset sometimes due to some latex related issues.
I love pandoc, thanks for this great tool :)<p>to me it's the perfect tool to generate user docs and manuals for software and other cli tools, my best use case is markdown (github flavoured) to man, markdown to HTML and PDF, etc.
Happy birthday, I used it for both outputting pdf, and often when encountering a very long html pages without styling (quite common around these parts) to output epub.