pdf VS pandoc

Hi dang, hope you are well. May I kindly ask why not? I spent two weeks writing the CSS / HTML / JavaScript, and did well documented code - in fact the output serves as both documentation of the code and also output from it (in my own stupid way, I was thinking I was following Donald Knuth’s Literate Programming Approach :D).

The repo (https://github.com/ashok-khanna/pdf) contains all the necessary code and is intended for others to reuse in their projects. Some of it isn’t straightforward, despite the guide looking easy - I had to figure out how CSS selectors and counters work for example, how MathJax interacted with Paged.Js.

I think the confusion comes from it being labeled as a “guide”, in fact it’s a full set of code to give the required functionality for high quality PDFs from HTML, using paged.js, the guide is just the self documentation as I figured I might as well use documentation for the sample output. Otherwise, I’d be genuinely curious on what constitutes Show HN vs normal posts?

I think the repo description and the way the output is confusing / unclear - the primary goal is very much meant to be a code base for people to reuse as I’ve noticed for many programmers, the design side can be a bit more elusive.

Separately, would it be possible to add beautiful back to the title - it’s not really about producing PDFs from html as browsers can already do that, and there are many other tools. The main aim is to have the functionality to produce very high quality typeset PDFs from HTML, which until now, I only felt PrinceXML did well and that’s a paid solution. Maybe we could say the title is “High quality PDFs from HTML using Paged.JS”? I know there has been a separate discussion on another thread on the overuse of the word beautiful in describing code - my view is that it has its place when it relates to output / UI.

Thanks for reading, and no issues otherwise (no need to reply).

My main authoring tool is then Emacs Markdown Mode (https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/). For data entry, it comes with some bells and whistles similar to org-mode, like C-c C-l for inserting links etc.

I seldom export my notes for external usage, but if it is the case, I use lowdown (https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/) which also comes with some nice output targets (among the more unusual are Groff and Terminal). Of cource pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does a very good job here, too.

This is one of those things that the ever-amazing pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does very well, on top of supporting virtually every other document format.

Folks feel the same way about Markdown versus LaTeX: why use something significantly more complicated where a looser, human-readable grammar works better?

For any other situations, I use https://pandoc.org/, or, generate a Word doc scriptomatically.

pandoc toolchain pour builder une version confortable/imprimable en phase de travail (ePub, pdf, docx, html)

Congrats on the launch, I guess, but there are so many free options that I can't think of a situation where paying $0.25 per document would be justified...? Just to name a few:

Back in the days, I used to use XSL-FO [0] and it was okay. It was not very precise but it rarely if ever broke, and was perfectly integrated with an XML/XSLT solution. Yeah, this was a long time ago.

Last month I used html-to-pdfmake [1] and it's also not very precise and more fragile, but very efficient and fast.

Yet another approach would be to pro grammatically generate .rtf files (for example) and use Pandoc [2] to produce PDFs (I have not tried this in production but don't see why it wouldn't work).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-to-pdfmake

[2] https://pandoc.org/

Others have mentioned static site generators. I like Hakyll [1] because it can tightly integrate with Pandoc [2] and allows you to develop custom solutions if your needs ever grow.

[1]: https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/

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

Have you compared it with a conversion by pandoc (https://pandoc.org/)?

I have used it to kickstart a blogging project that I wish to come back to soon. The Lua inter-op for custom readers, writers and filters is great but I wish there was more editor integration and even perhaps an official IDE/editor with built-in debugging features (probably something already do-able with Emacs but I haven't checked). The only blocker for my project is no support for "ChunkedDoc" for Lua filters [1] which forces me to write more code and a complicated Makefile.

[1]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/9061