Single sourcing from the command line
Command Line – pandoc
© Lead Image © Natalia Bannykh, 123RF.com
In search of a tool for creating multiple documents from a single source, Bruce revisits the universal document converter, pandoc.
The number of text formats in modern computing has steadily increased, resulting in complexity when it comes to porting to and from the different formats. Added to this complexity is the desire to single-source documents, which allows you to create different documents from a single file. With this in mind, I return to a tool I covered a few years ago, pandoc [1].
Universal Document Converter
Pandoc supports 22 input formats (Figure 1) and 25 output formats (Figure 2) – and half as many again if you count various versions of the same basic format. With so many formats to support, you might expect support conversion between formats to be spotty, especially if you are familiar with such efforts as Collabora's ongoing struggle to improve just LibreOffice's support of Microsoft Office. In fact, pandoc's man page warns [2]:
"One should not expect perfect conversions between every format and every other. Pandoc attempts to preserve the structural elements of a document, but not formatting details such as margin size. And some document elements, such as complex tables, may not fit into pandoc's simple document model. While conversions from pandoc's Markdown to all formats aspire to be perfect, conversions from formats more expressive than pandoc's Markdown can be expected to be lossy."
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