Pandoc Templates

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.

[0] https://zettlr.com/ [1] https://quarto.org/

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.

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.

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

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.

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 templates need an update for better logical operators. The supported yaml and conditionals are poor for even light use cases.

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

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.

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've always wanted to make a GUI client for pandoc

typst templates would be a great addition to these.

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