Discussion summary
Pandoc Lua filters are used for document conversions and automation, with recent discussions about their capabilities and potential improvements.
What the discussion says
- Some users explore making Pandoc reactive or incremental updates.
- Others highlight Pandoc's web browser integration and Lua filter applications.
- Concerns about Pandoc's complexity and documentation clarity are mentioned.
“Pandoc Lua filters help solve issues on DOCX and PDF conversions.”
“Pandoc has been around for a while, with recent updates making it more web-friendly.”
Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- 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.
by chaoxu - 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.
by dapperdrake - 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.
by kalcode - 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...
by lifthrasiir - I use pandoc filters when automatically updating/building packages (chocolatey) from GitHub repos/releases. When I built them I remember the documentation and API much less than this. As a developer I might have been easily overwhelmed by today's docs. On the other hand: today I guess those docs are rather read/ used by an AI than any human.by riedel
- 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.by a1o
- I might be worried if it wasn't pandoc. It's always been bulletproof for me.by fwip
- 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.
by zenoprax - 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:by leephillips