Thank you for pandoc. I made the (at the time perhaps not transparently wise) choice to go all in on it when I started my PhD, and that decision has paid nothing but dividends since. I owe my career as a scientist to it.

Thanks so much for pandoc!

I never heard about djot [0], is anyone using it?

[0]: https://djot.net/

Pandoc is amazing. I have HTML and want a PDF? One command and it just works painlessly. That was just my last use of pandoc this weekend. I do not use it that often, but when I do its perfect.

I have at times mused that writing the internal state of pandoc to disk (yes 13th standard etc) would be the most interoperable file format

> by writing N parsers (“readers”) and M renderers (“writers”), one could support N × M conversions.

Beautiful writeup for a wonderful project. In an age of vibe-coding hype it's also so nice to see how things can be extended and snowball in usefulness when things are built correctly, by hand, from basic principles.

> Perhaps, then, in the future, people will no longer have a need for tools like pandoc.

I think we will need wonderful things like pandoc more and more. As mentioned there is a huge ecological and practical difference. Even if LLMs could get infintisamally close to deterministic-level reliability, it's still so many more orders of magnitude better in efficiency, especially with big batch jobs etc.

Pandoc is great. I use it multiple times per day to move content between Outlook emails and a coding harness:

https://gist.github.com/rahimnathwani/210b1f9cb6ce731a304322...

  cat email-to-xyz.md | md2clip

  clip2md > email-from-xyz.md