Pandoc Lua Filters

(pandoc.org)

122 points | by ankitg12 2 days ago ago

10 comments

  • kalcode 2 hours ago

    I liked the Lua filters for solving issues on DOCX stuff for Markdown to Docx.

    For PDF stuff I haven't needed much Lua filters since switching to WeasyPrint for the PDF engine.

  • lifthrasiir 9 hours ago

    Is there anyone feeling that Pandoc is ever increasingly bloated? I have used Lua filters a decade ago [1] and the current documentation is nothing like my memories. I'm not even sure that how much of Lua scripts remain compatible across different Pandoc versions.

    [1] https://github.com/mearie/mearie.github.io/blob/source/res/w...

    • zenoprax 6 hours ago

      With a tagline of "a universal document converter" it is almost a guarantee to become a complicated program but how much of it is being used for any single conversion?

      Two more examples:

      Rclone is "bloated" but it needs to be in order to fulfill its purpose.

      ZFS is "bloated" because it combines volumes and filesystems but breaking the Unix philosophy also enables a different kind of synergy and simplicity elsewhere.

      • Blackthorn 3 hours ago

        "bloat" just means "any feature I am not personally using therefore I deem as useless and pointless".

      • lifthrasiir 6 hours ago

        A universal document converter is expected to expand via adding support for additional formats---that's okay (same for your other examples). I'm much more worried about the widening scope of the project.

    • a1o 6 hours ago

      We use it for seven years and it still runs fine when we update Pandoc - we usually always update things. I don’t remember anything about the docs, so not sure what changed.

    • fwip 4 hours ago

      I might be worried if it wasn't pandoc. It's always been bulletproof for me.

  • leephillips 4 hours ago

    Lua filters for Pandoc have been around for a quite a while. What’s newer is Pandoc’s ability to be used in web browsers. There’s a bit more about this and a general rundown of Pandoc in my recent article for LWN:

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1064692/

  • chaoxu 8 hours ago

    I've always wondered if pandoc can be made reactive. Say markdown to Pandoc AST.

    If one changes something, a quick update to the AST would happen incrementally.

    Now with all these llm I might actually see if it can be done.

    • dapperdrake 13 minutes ago

      Look at flag --standalone. At least for html output pandoc seems to be able to handle something that feels like partial pandoc input in practice and produce html output that behaves like a snippet.

      Pandoc AST - format called "native" - parses faster than pandoc markdown.