Pandoc the Ultimate Markdown Utility

I installed pandoc by svn trunk source code, because I failed to install the dependency library haddock by MacPorts.

Install (for OS X)

Assume you have already * installed cabal. * have your local bin directory ~/bin

cabal install utf8-string
cabal install zip-archive
svn checkout http://pandoc.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pandoc
cd pandoc
CABALOPTS=--user make
make test
PREFIX=~ make install-exec

Note that the environment variable CABALOPTS=--user. I use cabal by normal user, not by super user. In the case we have to explicitly set it. Now you have pandoc commands in your ~/bin.

$ ls ~/bin
hsmarkdown
html2markdown
markdown2pdf
pandoc
(and others already you have...)

Usage

I think I don't have to show the usage of those commands, because those filenames are enough comprehensive. Therefore, I'll show some example input and output below.

$ pandoc -h
pandoc [OPTIONS] [FILES]
Input formats:  native, markdown, markdown+lhs, rst, rst+lhs, html, latex, latex+lhs
Output formats:  native, html, html+lhs, s5, docbook, opendocument, odt, latex, latex+lhs, context, texinfo, man, markdown, markdown+lhs, rst, rst+lhs, mediawiki, rtf
Options:
  -f FORMAT, -r FORMAT  --from=FORMAT, --read=FORMAT                    
  -t FORMAT, -w FORMAT  --to=FORMAT, --write=FORMAT                     
  -s                    --standalone                                    
  -o FILENAME           --output=FILENAME                               
  -p                    --preserve-tabs                                 
                        --tab-stop=TABSTOP                              
                        --strict                                        
                        --reference-links                               
  -R                    --parse-raw                                     
  -S                    --smart                                         
  -m[URL]               --latexmathml[=URL], --asciimathml[=URL]        
                        --mimetex[=URL]                                 
                        --jsmath[=URL]                                  
                        --gladtex                                       
  -i                    --incremental                                   
  -N                    --number-sections                               
                        --no-wrap                                       
                        --sanitize-html                                 
                        --email-obfuscation=none|javascript|references  
                        --toc, --table-of-contents                      
  -c CSS                --css=CSS                                       
  -H FILENAME           --include-in-header=FILENAME                    
  -B FILENAME           --include-before-body=FILENAME                  
  -A FILENAME           --include-after-body=FILENAME                   
  -C FILENAME           --custom-header=FILENAME                        
  -T STRING             --title-prefix=STRING                           
  -D FORMAT             --print-default-header=FORMAT                   
                        --dump-args                                     
                        --ignore-args                                   
  -v                    --version                                       
  -h                    --help                                          

Assume sample.md is below:

## This is a pen
Is this a pen? No, it is Nancy.

    def fib(n)
      rand(n) ** 2
    end

* hara y y hara y?
* y

Then

$ pandoc -t html sample.md
<div id="this-is-a-pen"
><h2
  >This is a pen</h2
  ><p
  >Is this a pen? No, it is Nancy.</p
  ><pre
  ><code
    >def fib(n)
  rand(n) ** 2
end
</code
    ></pre
  ><ul
  ><li
    >hara y y hara y?</li
    ><li
    >y</li
    ></ul
  ></div
>

What a crazy line breaks!

$ pandoc -t html sample.md
\subsection{This is a pen}

Is this a pen? No, it is Nancy.

\begin{verbatim}
def fib(n)
  rand(n) ** 2
end
\end{verbatim}
\begin{itemize}
\item
  hara y y hara y?
\item
  y
\end{itemize}

Yes.

$ echo 'hi' | pandoc -t html
<p
>hi</p
>

Stdin OK.

$ pandoc -t html sample.md | html2markdown
## This is a pen

Is this a pen? No, it is Nancy.

    def fib(n)
      rand(n) ** 2
    end

-   hara y y hara y?
-   y

That's amazing! That's what I've wanted!

I used html2text written in python for my blogger.vim. It can be used for converting markdown from html, but I found a lot of misconversions. I had to write some wrapper for my blogger.vim.

Now I got released from the burden. I decided to switch using this pandoc instead of the python library html2text.