Open Source Showerthoughts #0
I am sure hope somebody™ already thought of this. Feel free to advertise your project here.
P.S.: Image transcription:
Patrick from SpongeBob SquarePants gesturing to the left with open hands:
Somebody should take document type conversion from Pandoc and version control from Git
Patrick gesturing to the right in a pushing motion:
And build a frontend around it
Shameless plug for Pandoc because I love it
That scalable vector graphic on the page shows source document type on the left and target type on the right. TL;DL: It converts about two dozen document types into about three dozen document types.
P.S.E.G.: PDF ← Markdown ←→ HTML → PDF
P.P.S: Where are my manners? Image transcription added to post.
The author is also involved in a markup language called djot, which is like markdown, but well-defined. It's an awesome language that will probably languish under markdown's dominance.
I've been using Quarto a lot for Data Science work and it uses Pandoc under the hood I recall.
Not sure what you're envisioning by Pandoc + git, but the RStudio IDE has a git integration and a WYSIWYM Quarto editor.
Quarto looks quite interesting indeed, thanks for pointing it out!
For those interested it's an "Open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc"
https://quarto.org/
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli
Like a data format inhabiting the centre of that conversion graph they have on their website, basically a superset of the available input types, that is then version controlled by git, and can be exported to any of the output formats, in a neat frontend that removes all that complexity from me. :D
Quarto user here, I use it for my blog.
There is also a vscode extension for WYSIWYM editing.
This! I want office that just uses markdown/latex and pandoc under the hood to output PDF documents
That's just LaTeX?
Haha, kind of. However conversion between all these formats is lossy in some directions and I don't know of any software that integrates version control of documents by default (not saying there are none).
P.S.: Yes I know, https://xkcd.com/927/
So what's stopping you from putting your LaTeX files into a git repo and building them into a pdf when needed?
Nothing, I'd just like a nice GUI around it.
What's a good Latex editor that abstracts the formatting behind buttons and doesn't need you to learn Latex?
The closest would probably be LyX, or Overleaf.
So something like eMacs with org mode and has pandoc under it to export to various outputs?
Sort of like LyX?
I'll have to take a look at that
am I crazy or is this just a markdown renderer
yeah, but then your car is one unwieldy bicycle
Well every one already recommended latex or markdown.
I would also recommend typst, it's a modern latex alternative easy to make templates and a markdown like syntax, none of all the backslash keywords that I somehow always forget.
Uhhh typst looks hot, that one I need to give a spin, thanks!
I made a template a while back when I had to make report, since I had a professor that disliked the markdown look of previous ones.
A bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, you make a few templates and write on them just like markdown with custom alias and whatnot.
Typst is fucking amazing. LaTeX is powerful but just takes too much effort to use for large part of the population to the point that I just can't recommend it to most people outside STEM. Typst is consistent, easier to use, faster, and collaborative. With no nonsensical error messages, broken builds, and technical debt - I can actually recommend it to most.
Speaking of LaTeX, I really recommend LyX. You don't need to know any LaTeX to use it, and the result is always satisfying
I am confused what would be the combined functionality of the merged product. Do you need to output of converted files to be added to git when a document is version controlled?
Well like uzay said, basically just an office GUI that allows me to import/export into a lot of formats and automates document versioning away.
Do check on eMacs. I know it does a fantastic job for org mode but I’m not fully aware how close markdown support is.
You can have Pandoc and Git with Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/). Both as Plugins. Or even with VS Code. Obsidian sadly isn't open source.
So like gitit?
I’m currently working on this, using git and having GitHub actions produce artifacts when building the markdown files to pdf. It’s great!
Pandoc is absolutely amazing indeed
That sounds like bash. It supports editors too (with holy wars included).
First time hearing about pandoc are you saying like a more competent version of o365 or confluence?
No Pandoc isn’t an editor by any means. It’s an document conversion tool. Think converting a Markdown file into an docx or html or epub or pptx or pdf (via LaTeX or ConText). That’s what pandoc does.
It's also known as The Only Thing Written in Haskell That People Actually Use.
If I'm understanding your question right, kind of. Pandoc is only for document conversion though, no spreadsheets, presentations, etc. But at that it can convert between a lot of formats. And git can be used to version and share those documents.