I write manuscripts with LaTeX. Yes, it might old-fashioned, compared to Markdown—which I also use—but it fits my needs. I appreciate its handling of references (I mean, from the literature), and of the cross-references. Figure 1 always means figure 1! Unfortunately, I am a bit of an outlier in my discipline, biology, to keep it general. All my colleagues I’m supposed to write manuscripts with rely and the good old Word.
Recently, a friend told me about pandoc. The website presents pandoc as a “universal document converter”. And it is! I tried it at first on a simple LaTeX document, with a bit of text, one figure, one table, one reference, and one cross-reference. It did a perfect job. I was not worried and I kept writing my manuscript. I should have actually checked regularly if pandoc was still able to digest my manuscript, as it was getting bigger and bigger, and more complex. I realised that after adding the final point, and then I got worried…
I ran pandoc again, with the exact same settings that worked three weeks earlier on the very simple document, and I was waiting for the fatal crash… But no. Everything went fine. I felt a mixture of surprise, shock and joy.
So if you need to convert document from one format to another, check if pandoc can do it. And thank you pandoc!
