cben/mathdown

LaTeX export

Opened this issue · 10 comments

cben commented
  • Either use Docverter or host pandoc myself on heroku.
  • One-click button to then import into writelatex and/or sharelatex.

Far away:

  • Markdown lint that warns about suspicious markdown (e.g. list not preceded by newline).
cben commented

Tempted to host pandoc myself, to have unrestricted choice of markdown flavors, and to json input/output which would make easy to run arbitrary client-side filters in javascript (2 round trips but who cares).

cben commented

Pie-in-the-sky plans:

In the long term, I’m dreaming of creating a markdown normailzation & export wizard, at which point it’d be easier to run pandoc myself than use docverter:

  • give user fine-grained control over markdown extensions (and show the exact pandoc command line)
  • offer markdown->markdown conversion between dialects
  • markdown “lint” highlighting possible mistakes and suboptimal syntaxes (missing blank lines before header/list, “lazy” wrapping etc.)
  • for latex export, create combined pandoc+sharelatex app with 3 panes: markdown->tex->pdf.
    Users would be able to edit only the markdown and see tex and pdf update; when happy with result, download tex.
cben commented
  • However I implement comments (cf #41), latex export should convert them to pretty todonotes.
cben commented

Hmm, Gitbook has several issues about scientific features (math, footnotes and/or citations). They seem receptive to adopting pandoc extensions.
Perhaps Gitbook should be used for quality export to PDF/epub? The problem is that it uses Marked, has no latex export, so it's not in the normal path to a And Mathdown is certainly not the best platform to full-length books...
Still, should keep an eye on it for dialect compatibility...

cben commented

  1. I've wrapped Pandoc in a web service. You can try it here https://github.com/mrded/pandoc-as-a-service and here http://pandoc-as-a-service.com
    -- http://stackoverflow.com/a/31028085/239657

  2. I had an itch to scratch, and I wanted to get a bit more familiar with Openshift. [...] This is a simple app that takes the URL of a markdown file on GitHub, and outputs a pandoc converted PDF. I wanted to use pandoc specifically, because it produces PDF’s that were beautifully created with LaTeX.
    -- https://ttboj.wordpress.com/2014/10/18/hacking-out-an-openshift-app/

cben commented

The latter installs pandoc on OpenShift by copying the files and latex by running texlive installer.
[https://github.com/purpleidea/pdfdoc/blob/master/INSTALL.md]

cben commented

pandoc-as-a-service does support specifying custom markdown extensions :-)

$ curl -H "Content-Type: text/markdown_github-blank_before_header+tex_math_dollars+tex_math_single_backslash" -X POST http://pandoc-as-a-service.com/html -d '
foo
# header
$math^2$
'
<p>foo</p>
<h1 id="header">header</h1>
<p><span class="math"><em>m</em><em>a</em><em>t</em><em>h</em><sup>2</sup></span></p>
cben commented
  • Whatever I use, I'll want to run my own instance for privacy of doc content.
cben commented

markup.rocks was a cool demo of pandoc-compiled-to-JS but it's unmaintained for 7 years.

This is a sizable project, I'm not gonna work on this any time soon (see #172).