pandoc-sidenote VS tufte-pandoc-css

I can’t imagine the intended audience being so wide as to include a goal of “replacing Markdown as the default on GitHub.”

Instead, this project appeals to me as someone who’s already “bought in” to the pandoc ecosystem. Pandoc makes it really easy to write filters[1] and to take the same source file to generate web pages[2], Reveal.js presentations, Beamer presentations, and long-form PDFs[3]. As someone who writes most things in Markdown compiled via pandoc, I see the cracks in the edges all too often, but I’m too stubborn to give up markdown or any of the tools I’ve built up around pandoc and pandoc markdown. I could absolutely see there come a day where I find some last straw where I can’t get done with pandoc Markdown what I need to get done, and djot seems like it would at least be a contender. I’m sure there are many pundits here would chime in and say “just use Asciidoc,” but every time I look at a syntax quick reference, I get about halfway down the page before thinking “nah, this looks too foreign, I don’t want something that diverges this far from Markdown.”

Djot deviates in annoying ways from Markdown, but not as many and so it’d be an easier pill to swallow for the narrow audience of people like me who want something mostly similar to Markdown that works well with pandoc and avoids the most common syntactic oddities of Markdown.

[1] https://github.com/jez/pandoc-sidenote

[2] https://github.com/jez/pandoc-markdown-css-theme

[3] https://github.com/jez/pandoc-starter

There's https://github.com/jez/tufte-pandoc-css which integrates with Pandoc.

I use it for my blog that features margin notes from time to time: https://blog.kdheepak.com/

Though I had to write a lua filter to make the Pandoc margin notes work appropriately :)

jez/tufte-pandoc-css - Starter files for using Pandoc Markdown with Tufte CSS