< antti > dropped a link
Pandoc - twenty-years-of-pandoc
https://pandoc.org/twenty-years-of-pandoc.htmlOn August 3, 2006, I uploaded the first version of pandoc to my website, releasing it under the free GPL license. Pandoc 0.1 consisted of about 3000 lines of Haskell code, with no dependencies aside from GHC’s standard library. It could convert Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX documents into any of these formats, plus RTF or S5. I had no idea at the time that this would just be the first of over two hundred releases over the next twenty years; that the project would become the most popular program written in Haskell ; that I would spend countless hours on bug-fixes, improvement, and project management; that I would collaborate with programmers in many other countries; that pandoc would come to support over fifty document formats; that it would allow automatic generation of citations and bibliographies; that it would become integrated into academic writing tools like Quarto and
what others said
- Hacker News 389 points · 49 comments
Commenters overwhelmingly praised Pandoc’s reliability and versatility, citing specific daily workflows such as stripping HTML styling from Office exports, generating static sites, and normalizing binary documents like .docx for git diffs. The thread briefly diverged to ask if anyone was using the alternative format parser Djot, though no further discussion followed. Strongest concrete objections highlighted Pandoc’s advantage over Typst and Hevea in producing clean, customizable source code, while its deterministic nature was contrasted favorably against LLMs.