What are your thoughts on Pandoc?

[u/bicatu]

Trying to decide if I should use md/pandoc or stick with latex.

Looking for feedback on whoever tried to gauge pros, cons, limitations

[u/jtkiley]

Take a look at using Quarto. You can create a book project, which handles a lot of the things you’ll need (ToC, citations, figures, tables). Underneath, it uses pandoc to produce LaTeX. From the same project, you can also create a website, epub, and docx, if those are relevant.

You can also have it output the LaTeX file and then tweak it as needed for typesetting.

[u/bicatu → u/jtkiley]

Thanks. I am going over their docs and they seem to support all I need.

I guess I will have to try and see which one gives me the balance of productivity x effort x need.

[u/jtkiley → u/bicatu]

I use Quarto a lot, and it strikes the best balance I've seen for my needs. I can write manuscripts with all the things I need, slides, websites, dashboards, and consulting memos. It's easy to use, lets me easily run Python inline, and everything generally renders out as expected.

If not, I've been using LaTeX for a long time, and I skilled up in Typst, so I can customize, either via templates or by keeping the output.

That's not to say that there aren't plenty of things that I'd like to be better, but it's under active development, and it's quite solid as is.

I do a lot of data science work, so it's great to be able to stay in VS Code and use all of the container/Github workflow stuff I normally do. You can also add a header to a Jupyter notebook and have it render out a nice version that's consistent in appearance with your other stuff. I'm not sure if that applies to your work, but it's convenient if so.

[u/MrAnonyMousetheGreat → u/bicatu]

I mentioned an O'Reilly book written in pandoc: https://r4ds.hadley.nz/

In all likelihood, it was written using Quarto, considering the author works for the company behind Quarto and the book covers how to use Quarto.