Typst, the new writing tool, was open sourced a couple of days ago. This is right up my alley of course, and I have a couple of thoughts on it, which I share here. What is it? Typst is a writing tool that’s described as a LaTeX alternative: it takes plain-text markup as input and can produce nice looking PDFs from that.

Typst, the new writing tool, was open sourced a couple of days ago. This is right up my alley of course, and I have a couple of thoughts on it, which I share here. What is it? Typst is a writing tool that’s described as a LaTeX alternative: it takes plain-text markup as input and can produce nice looking PDFs from that.

Pandoc’s Markdown allows for “fancy lists”, i.e., lists with different styles used for the marker of ordered list items. E.g., the list (I) primus (#) secundus (#) tertius uses uppercase roman numerals and double parentheses for the markers. It gets rendered as Continuations The fancy lists feature also allows to continue lists after an intermediate paragraph: i. one #. another Interruption; not part of any list. iii.

Pandoc’s Markdown allows for “fancy lists”, i.e., lists with different styles used for the marker of ordered list items. E.g., the list (I) primus (#) secundus (#) tertius uses uppercase roman numerals and double parentheses for the markers. It gets rendered as primus secundus tertius Continuations The fancy lists feature also allows to continue lists after an intermediate paragraph: i. one #. another Interruption;

Line breaks usually have no semantic meaning within a Markdown paragraph. However, using line breaks to mark the end of a sentece can help with productivity for various reasons. ¹ Documents with one sentence per line are also called “ventilated prose”, and the Write the {Ascii}Docs website has a good article on that topic.

Line breaks usually have no semantic meaning within a Markdown paragraph. However, using line breaks to mark the end of a sentece can help with productivity for various reasons.¹ Documents with one sentence per line are also called “ventilated prose”, and the Write the {Ascii}Docs website has a good article on that topic.

When extending pandoc (or Quarto) with Lua filters, we interact with so-called Lua userdata objects. These objects are used to wrap document AST elements, making them accessible from Lua scripts. They mostly behave like normal Lua tables. This post is intended as a quick overview, listing interesting properties of userdata objects.

When pandoc is used in larger pipelines, e.g. in combination with Sphinx, it can be useful to pack everything up into one neat container. One option is to base the container on a pandoc image like pandoc/core, but this may be difficult due to other dependencies.

Setting the document font this way works for ConTeXt, LaTeX, and HTML output. The fonts used in docx or odt output must be controlled with the reference document instead. The default LaTeX engine is pdflatex, which only supports TeX’s own font format and cannot use the TrueType or OpenType fonts installed on the system. However, XeLaTeX was written with that in mind; switching to that engine allows to specify any font available on the system.

When pandoc is used in larger pipelines, e.g. in combination with Sphinx, it can be useful to pack everything up into one neat container. One option is to base the container on a pandoc image like pandoc/core, but this may be difficult due to other dependencies.