pandoc-latex-admonition VS pandoc

For extending markdown capabilities, there are many plugins/filters. Example [1].

I remember using extensions/filters for citations, etc.

Ultimately it is just some custom tooling around pandoc; so whatever you can do in pandoc, you can get done in the book.

[1] - https://github.com/chdemko/pandoc-latex-admonition

[2] - https://pandoc.org/

You could do it with Pandoc (https://github.com/jgm/pandoc), it supports both Latex and Typst as input and output formats, and can use either as a PDF engine.

> I'm pretty sure the author would say that what you end up with is a KeenWrite document.

Documents written in KeenWrite can be typeset using tools that already exist:

* https://yihui.org/knitr/

* https://pandoc.org/

* https://github.com/jfisteus/html2xhtml

I've kept compatibility with pandoc (CommonMark) and knitr a priority; I wrote KeenWrite to replace a shell script that was calling out to those software packages. My Typesetting Markdown blog posts dive into the script and programs:

https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...

Pandoc

Write notes in markdown files for simplicity, use https://pandoc.org/ for post processing

pandoc works great for md to pdf. Supports styling with css as well.

I really like Pandoc codebase [0]. It is a document converter written in Haskell.

Reading it’s source code a decade ago was a turning point for me. Prior to that, I always felt an insurmountable gap between my toy codebases and real projects. All those open source software written in C++ etc. looked so unapproachable that I felt like I could not write production ready software.

Pandoc however, was written in a language I didn’t know and did something very complicated very thoroughly, yet remained accessible. It was very nicely laid out and I could easily follow how it constructs it’s internal representation of documents and converts between them. I think this made me catch the functional programming bug for the next decade that let me build way bigger things than I had any right to, without getting crushed underneath all the complexity. Putting together something in Java or even contributing to OOP Python codebases was still like an exercise in frustration, no matter how much better I thought I’m getting at programming I would feel stupid trying to wrap my head around those abstractions and hierarchies. Somehow FP just clicked for me and made me see how I could start from a simple library call and little by little build the complete program.

Today I am comfortable with all kinds of paradigms and levels of abstraction, but I definitely owe a lot to Pandoc for showing me I was smart enough to understand and modify real world software I did not build myself.

[0] https://github.com/jgm/pandoc

I want to ask this question before Reddit dies. What are some good software that have advanced features that don't try to be hand-holdy and are targeted to programmers, such as scripting, regex, automation, etc. For example, I find excel formulas to be extremely unintuitive, so something like Quadratic is a god send. Other examples are software like Obsidian, Typst, and Pandoc.

If you really want to go that route, take a look at pandoc and ping me if you have questions. Pandoc in combination with the Eisvogel LaTeX template can be a quick way to get a really good-looking doc.