Twenty Years of Pandoc

> by writing N parsers (“readers”) and M renderers (“writers”), one could support N × M conversions.

Beautiful writeup for a wonderful project. In an age of vibe-coding hype it's also so nice to see how things can be extended and snowball in usefulness when things are built correctly, by hand, from basic principles.

> Perhaps, then, in the future, people will no longer have a need for tools like pandoc.

I think we will need wonderful things like pandoc more and more. As mentioned there is a huge ecological and practical difference. Even if LLMs could get infintisamally close to deterministic-level reliability, it's still so many more orders of magnitude better in efficiency, especially with big batch jobs etc.

Pandoc is great. I use it multiple times per day to move content between Outlook emails and a coding harness:

https://gist.github.com/rahimnathwani/210b1f9cb6ce731a304322...

  cat email-to-xyz.md | md2clip

  clip2md > email-from-xyz.md

One thing I like with pandoc is that it produces clean html or latex code (it can also produce clean markdown with the right option).

If you compare this with the HTML produced by typst or hevea, this is super useful, as we can then roll out our own styles.

That a professor of philosophy [1] made tools [2] that are used by millions around the world... that's just mind boggling. In a good (great!) way.

Pandoc is my go-to tool. Thank you, Sir!

[1] https://johnmacfarlane.net/index.html

[2] https://johnmacfarlane.net/tools.html

Love pandoc, I use it for all sorts of stuff…here is my minimal static site generator:

find . -name '*.md' -type f -exec sh -c '

  for file do  
    out="docs/${file#./}"  
    out="${out%.md}.html"
    mkdir -p "$(dirname "$out")"  
    pandoc --quiet --template template.html "$file" -o "$out"  
  done  

' sh {} +

Thanks so much for pandoc!

I never heard about djot [0], is anyone using it?

[0]: https://djot.net/

Thank you for pandoc. I made the (at the time perhaps not transparently wise) choice to go all in on it when I started my PhD, and that decision has paid nothing but dividends since. I owe my career as a scientist to it.

I have at times mused that writing the internal state of pandoc to disk (yes 13th standard etc) would be the most interoperable file format

Pandoc is amazing. I have HTML and want a PDF? One command and it just works painlessly. That was just my last use of pandoc this weekend. I do not use it that often, but when I do its perfect.

Effort worth admiration. Thank you for creating pandoc! It allowed me to write my CV in more readable markdown, but also get nice pdf with latex.

My most used pandoc snippet:

tidyhtml () { pandoc -f html-native_divs-native_spans -t markdown-raw_html-raw_attribute | pandoc -f markdown -t html }

which strips out styling, wrapper divs, spans, inline attributes, etc from (for instance) HTML copied from a google or word doc. Just the semantic goodness!

pandoc was (and still is) critical to some of my flows. I hope it never dies!