Comments on: What are the alternatives to pandoc

Question: What are the alternatives to pandoc

caek — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:55:14 -0800

What are the alternatives to pandoc? I'm looking for tools that will allow me to maintain a large document in a simple plain text format such as markdown and compile it to PDF and HTML.

Bonus points will be awarded to PDF that is properly typeset (ideally by TeX) and HTML that allows customization via stylesheets, headers, footers, etc. There's nothing particularly wrong with pandoc, apart from the requirement of a Haskell compiler, which is a pain but not a showstopper; I'm just curious about the alternatives. Maintaining in LaTeX and compiling to PDF and HTML is not an option. The "source" must be something less markup-heavy, such as markdown or textile. GUIs are not necessary but must be available on OS X if their use is required.

Comments about their unique capabilities, favourite features, and their particular strengths and weaknesses are very welcome, as are links to documents that are available online (HTML or PDF) so I can see them in action.

Finally, is there a name for this kind of tool?

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:21:17 -0800

MediaWiki markup. For a demonstration, see Wikipedia.

By: thisjax

thisjax — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:26:06 -0800

Maruku is a command-line tool written in Ruby that mostly fits the bill. There are some examples of output documents on the website.

By: caek

caek — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:06:34 -0800

Thanks guys. Anyone for any more?

By: esd

esd — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:02:53 -0800

Muse for Emacs does this kind of thing. You write your document(s) in a Muse-specific format (it's kind of like Markdown), and then Muse can output those documents in many formats, including PDF and HTML. I believe that the produced HTML is customizable, although I've never had occasion to actually do that.

By: esd

esd — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:14:58 -0800

An update on the HTML customization: the HTML section of the Muse manual says that you can customize the header and/or footer used when generating HTML (by giving a simple string or by giving a path to a file) as well as the stylesheet used (by providing CSS in a string or with a link tag to an external stylesheet).

The relevant options are muse-html-header, muse-html-footer, and muse-html-style-sheet.

By: esd

esd — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:25:01 -0800

Ack! That last link should be like this: HTML section of the Muse manual.