Introducing Pandoc

I was trying to figure out a way to write math heavy blog posts where I found Pandoc.

There are well-known JavaScript libraries like MathJax and KaTex for this purpose, and you just need to through in a CDN provider’s URL in a script tag and start using the special characters like double $.

I had two problems:

• I wanted to use KaTex which is much faster than MathJax.
• I wanted to be able to use my latex macro file (gradually populated during my Ph.D.) to write math-heavy blogs faster.

Major Lessons

Resolving the first issue needs another post.
For achieving the second goal, I couldn’t find MarkDown based solution, and the only way around that I found is due to steps of this post which uses Pandoc to convert latex (with macros) to HTML files directly.

Pandoc seems to be a great tool with reliable performance in converting between any document types. The plan is to use it to convert between MarkDown and Beamer for my future presentation. It would be fun to have a web-friendly version of presentation along with the PDF version.

Minor Lessons

I tried to use it for generating content of README.md files of a project on GitLab, but unfortunately, it didn’t work. The problem is with the non-standard MarkDown that GitLab uses known as GitLab Flavored MarkDown (GFM). Pandoc does not support GitLab GFM and ironically reserved the --gfm option to convert to GitHub flavored MarkDown! Someday, someone should standardize the heap of MarkDown languages for a greater good!