Top all-time · #429
John MacFarlane
Personal blog · johnmacfarlane.netprogrammingwriting
John MacFarlane's personal blog at johnmacfarlane.net covers programming and writing. Since 2009, 130 different Hacker News readers have linked it 154 times, most often “Pandoc - a universal document converter”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this site as the home of Pandoc, the universal document converter, and its Pandoc Markdown documentation. Most comments just suggest Pandoc for format conversion.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Pandoc's Markdown extensions and defaults called sensible; a section to read for details; tools called structured procrastination.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
John MacFarlane
Most-linked posts?
- Pandoc - a universal document converter76 people · 87 mentions · first linked 2009-04-15
- Beyond Markdown (2018)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-04-04
- /pandoc/epub.html5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-01-09
- John MacFarlane: Author of pandoc, texmath, gitit, yst, CommonMark4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-02-22
- /pandoc/README.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-10-26
- /pandoc/README.html4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-11-16
- /pandoc3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-09-26
- /pandoc/demo/example9/pandocs-markdown.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-04-27
- Pandoc: universal document converter2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-06-06
- /pandoc/README.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-10-26
What Hacker News says?
> a project started to convert between various file formats typically used for writing/word processing ( https://github.com/uxproductivity/DocFormats ). sounds bit like Pandoc: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
Comment linking /pandoc/
on “Standard Markdown”Submitted Pandoc: universal document converter as a story · 103 points
HN discussionI think this is great, I'm all for extending markdown for specific situations but I think the base h1, li, and p tags should be clearly defined. It appears that most parsers could adopt most of the spec without breaking backwards compatibility. (I'm probably wrong.) There's an obvious annoyance with markdown like this, where a lack of a blank line after the headlines causes problems but only in a few parsers. I'm gl…
Comment linking /babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=%23+I+love+this+stuff%0A%23%23+A+LOT!%0A-+li+1%0A-+li+2
on “Standard Markdown”Submitted Beyond Markdown (2018) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMost content can be written in something other than LaTeX, especially in early drafts. I always start drafting papers in Markdown. I cannot imagine going from start to finish with Markdown though. Especially since most papers have fairly strict style guidelines and length restrictions. After a draft or two, transitions to LaTeX is a must. [Pandoc]( http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ ) for the win!
Comment linking /pandoc/
on “Neovim”Submitted Beyond Markdown: difficulties of the Commonmark specification as a story · 4 points
HN discussion(My post got long, so I've put a standalone version, with better markup rendering, here: http://gist.io/9161898. ) [TikZ] is a perfect example of TeX's missed potential: it is an outstandingly well designed DSL for diagram creation, embedded in an insane macro language. The moment you try to do anything nontrivial that exploits the programmatic (rather than purely declarative) nature of TikZ you immediately run into…
Comment linking /pandoc/scripting.html
on “Neovim”Submitted Pandoc 1.13 released as a story · 3 points
HN discussionCheck out pandoc [1], it will let you write documents in Markdown + LaTeX for equations and then convert it to LaTeX, a PDF, or several other document formats. Also, even though Markdown tends to be fairly easy to write, there are many edge cases where you can't really be sure what the result is unless you try it. [1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
Comment linking /pandoc/
on “Neovim”Submitted Pandoc - a universal document converter as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYes I came here also to add a +1 to ensuring that whatever standards discussions would include Pandoc and it's awesome implementation and converter. From the link, scroll down to 'Pandoc’s Markdown' about a third of the way down the page for all the details. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html
Comment linking /pandoc/README.html
on “The Future of Markdown”Submitted Beyond Markdown as a story · 2 points
HN discussion+1 for Pandoc. It's awesome. Also, it needs to be mentioned that Pandoc supports its own set of (IMO) sensible extensions / defaults to Gruber markdown [1]. [1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdow...
Comment linking /pandoc/README.html
on “The Future of Markdown”Submitted John MacFarlane: Author of pandoc, texmath, gitit, yst, CommonMark as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://raw.github.com/gist/3956665/d549ea53817335c868e750ca... How can this be harder than creating table with Word? Word always gets in the way. Word appears to be easier but down the road, it always end up as a painful process. For me just the benefit of being mergable and delegating styling at the end of the tool chain is just plain great. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#tables Edit: rendering issue…
Comment linking /pandoc/README.html
on “The Future of Markdown”Submitted Pandoc: universal document converter as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou should look at Pandoc[1]. It's a Markdown-to-everything converter, and though I'm not super familiar with the code I believe it's well written. One of my favorite tools for writing. [1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
Comment linking /pandoc/
on “The Future of Markdown”Submitted Beyond Markdown as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhy not just move to Pandoc[1]? 1. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
Comment linking /pandoc/
on “The Future of Markdown”Submitted Beyond Markdown as a story · 1 points
HN discussion(shameless plug) I wrapped Pandoc[1] in a web service and added on nice PDF exports and called it Docverter[2]. It will convert basically anything plain-text, including Markdown, into almost anything else plaintext, HTML, RTF or Docx. I also added rich PDF exports that go through a HTML intermediary. If this gains some traction I'm sure I'll be adding support for it at some point. [1]: a wonderful almost-everything-…
Comment linking /pandoc/
on “The Future of Markdown”Submitted Pandoc a universal document converter as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI really hope that they borrow a lot if not everything from pandoc[1]. My only real complaint with pandoc is the table formatting, but I think fiddlosopher is adding org-mode like table support. If you have not taken a pandoc for a spin I highly recommend you do so soon. In addition to being a great markdown dialect the pandoc tool set is the swiss army knife of text formatting. It is amazing how many formats pandoc…
Comment linking /pandoc/README.html
on “The Future of Markdown”Submitted Pandoc - swiss army knife of markups (markdown -> PDF, HTML, EPUB, LaTeX ...) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionfwiw Pandoc's author, John MacFarlane, is also behind these projects that try to unify the Markdown ecosystem: - Babelmark, a tool to compare how different Markdown parsers interpret the same Markdown input. https://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/ - CommonMark, the first formalized Markdown standard, and now the de-facto Markdown standard. https://commonmark.org/ (He's the first listed member of the team.) I feel lik…
Comment linking /babelmark2/
on “Pandoc – A universal document converter”Submitted Convert markup formats with pandoc as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI love that he calls [1] the incredibly useful tools he built a product of structured procrastination [2]. [1] https://johnmacfarlane.net/tools [2] http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
Comment linking /tools
on “Pandoc – A universal document converter”pandoc will do pretty much exactly that. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html
Comment linking /pandoc/README.html
on “Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online”I just wrote my resume in markdown and export it to txt/html/doc/PDF with Pandoc: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc
Comment linking /pandoc
on “JSON Resume – a JSON-based open source standard for resumes”If you just want to install pandoc so you can convert things, see: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/installing.html (There's an OSX binary there) Seeing as how you already have a functioning install of ipython and a setup you're otherwise happy with, this is probably the easiest route. Also, just so it's clear what's going on, ipython notebooks and (especially) format conversion are optional (but very useful) parts…
Comment linking /pandoc/installing.html
on “Python code to solve xkcd 1313 by Peter Norvig”
