alt.hn

8/3/2026 at 3:04:53 PM

Twenty Years of Pandoc

https://pandoc.org/twenty-years-of-pandoc.html

by fiddlosopher

8/3/2026 at 10:40:29 PM

> 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.

by adamddev1

8/3/2026 at 10:50:11 PM

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

by rahimnathwani

8/3/2026 at 11:23:55 PM

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!

by dannyobrien

8/3/2026 at 10:39:39 PM

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

by rao-v

8/3/2026 at 8:30:44 PM

Thanks so much for pandoc!

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

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

by jiehong

8/3/2026 at 8:19:31 PM

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.

by darthoctopus

8/3/2026 at 11:26:07 PM

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

by BeetleB

8/3/2026 at 11:10:53 PM

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.

by oytech

8/3/2026 at 9:45:46 PM

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.

by graemep