<story><title>Pandoc</title><url>https://pandoc.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smohare</author><text>I’ve never understood the impetus for not using full LaTeX in an academic contex, given that the boiler plate is so minimal and presumably one has a built up a personal template over time.&lt;p&gt;For blog posts and notes I see the appeal, since the boilerplate can be a hindrance to spontaneous writing.</text></item><item><author>Schiphol</author><text>I do all of my academic writing in pandoc. As compared to LaTeX this means no boilerplate (yet you can still use full LaTeX syntax for equations and the like) and, if the publisher &amp;#x27;needs&amp;#x27; a Word file, you are one click away from providing it. All with plain text files that you can put under version control, get meaningful diffs, etc. It&amp;#x27;s just great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>CJefferson</author><text>Latex can&amp;#x27;t produce web output, which is increasingly a target I want.&lt;p&gt;Also, Latex can&amp;#x27;t produce any output which is accessible to blind people (other than giving them the raw LaTeX). The PDFs latex produces are probably the least accessible format available (much worse than a word proeuced pdf, or some html). This matters to me, and should matter more to other people (in my opinion).</text></comment>
<story><title>Pandoc</title><url>https://pandoc.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smohare</author><text>I’ve never understood the impetus for not using full LaTeX in an academic contex, given that the boiler plate is so minimal and presumably one has a built up a personal template over time.&lt;p&gt;For blog posts and notes I see the appeal, since the boilerplate can be a hindrance to spontaneous writing.</text></item><item><author>Schiphol</author><text>I do all of my academic writing in pandoc. As compared to LaTeX this means no boilerplate (yet you can still use full LaTeX syntax for equations and the like) and, if the publisher &amp;#x27;needs&amp;#x27; a Word file, you are one click away from providing it. All with plain text files that you can put under version control, get meaningful diffs, etc. It&amp;#x27;s just great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>susam</author><text>I agree. If one is going to use LaTeX directly or indirectly via Pandoc, eventually one would have to build up a personal template to fine-tune the look and feel of the documents.&lt;p&gt;If one is going to write LaTeX code anyway, it seems easier  and cleaner to use LaTeX all the way, move all the boilerplate along with the personal template to say, a file named preamble.tex, and \input{preamble.tex} in the documents.&lt;p&gt;However, there are situations where Pandoc can be convenient. For example, I wanted a document[1] to be written primarily as README.md (CommonMark format), so that GitHub could render it as the project README. At the same time I wanted to render a PDF output from a customized form of the content. Pandoc is convenient for cases like this although it takes a bit of work to fine-tune the formatting and customize the content for each output format.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;susam&amp;#x2F;gitpr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;susam&amp;#x2F;gitpr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;susam&amp;#x2F;gitpr&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;Makefile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;susam&amp;#x2F;gitpr&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;Makefile&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>