[Haskell-cafe] Pandoc questions

[David Menendez]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> David Menendez wrote:
>>
>> Markdown allows arbitrary HTML tags, so you can just put the terms in
>> a <dfn> element.
>>
>> I don't know if that will work with the LaTeX conversion. Markdown is
>> specifically designed to produce HTML, so it's not clear to me how
>> Pandoc does any of the non-HTML output formats.
>>
>
> Well, no... Markdown is a way of marking up text in a way which is still
> moderately readable to human beings. You can turn it into any markup format
> in principle. The trouble as, as soon as Pandoc doesn't understand the
> markup, you can't really expect it to handle the translation any more...

The first sentence on the Markdown web page is: "Markdown is a
text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers."

<http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/>

The Markdown syntax guide states: "Markdown's syntax is intended for
one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web. ... For
any markup that is not covered by Markdown's syntax, you simply use
HTML itself."

Markdown text may contain arbitrary HTML blocks. Any attempt to
produce LaTeX or PDF from Markdown must therefore be able to convert
arbitrary HTML.

-- 
Dave Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>