Why i like Pandoc with markdown

The truth is that i love the look and feel of latex documents but for general use it gets too much syntax around the writing. Especially for documents that are mostly text, no math and potentially some figures..

Markdown and Pandoc to the rescue! To make simple meeting notes and generally writing things down markdown has all the needed bells and whistles, headings, lists and links. The syntax for all these are simple to remember and flows nicely while writing. The document in itself is fully readable, even for persons more used with what-you-see-is what-you-get editors.

But people in general are not used to open .md files, and the last time a saw such a file opened in Word, it was not beautiful. PDFs though, everyone can read.

This is where Pandoc and a good latex template enters. A simple command fills the latex template with text from the markdown file and a beautiful PDF emerges. The template handles all te common features from markdown like headings, links, tables and figures as well as adding support for inline latex for math and other tools, to fully leverage the power of latex.

But there is even more, as an YAML header can be added to the markdown file where various data can be added and then acted upon by the template. This can be used to add document numbers to headers, turning todo-notes rendering off or just to set the document title.

All these features gives that Pandoc and markdown in combination are a powerful tool to generate “serious looking documents” while at the same time have a sleek and slimmed writing experience.