thehackerwithin/berkeley

[suggestion] pandoc for academic writing

ickc opened this issue · 3 comments

ickc commented

Hi, not sure if this will be of interest in general for the group. pandoc is already involved in academic writing for example as the backend of rmarkdown in R, and ipython notebook in Python; and also Authorea which is an alternative of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf.

pandoc base on the markdown syntax, with extensions such as raw html and raw LaTeX, and is a program that input and output md, docx, tex, html, epub, etc.

I'm kind of a heavy user and contributor of pandoc. I'm not sure if I'm the right person to give a talk though (I'm a newbie here). The creator of pandoc is a Berkeley professor. I could contact him and see if he's interested in giving the talk. But the more important question is if the audiences will like it.

ickc commented

Just to mention I probably can give a talk about that after March 10th. Don't know if any body is interested in it though.

matthew-brett commented
ickc commented

Just to mention a couple of topics that can be included in such kind of talk (the ones with GitHub checkbox means I'm not the right person to go through those points)

  • makefile and shell scripts: use makefile to build complicated pandoc projects
  • RStudio and iPython Notebook: both of these tools uses pandoc as the backend. More details can be given on how to effectively control your document via this.
  • Travis CI: how you automate the build of the documents and auto-release it on GitHub Releases. This can be useful for collaboration on writing in pandoc (similar to how people use ShareLaTeX / Overleaf to collaborate).
  • pandoc filters: how to write Python scripts that modifies the internal pandoc AST to alter your documents and augment your workflow.
    • filters can be written in other languages
    • example: ickc/pantable, a package I wrote such that you can insert CSV table with markdown syntax, instead of other markdown table syntax that is difficult to edit.
  • how to convert between documents format and cleanup it up. e.g. how to go from .doc to .tex.
  • How to use LaTeX syntax in markdown, where the most useful example will be equations, that can be rendered in MathJax.
    • How to embed MathJax in ePub output.