cmark?

[iwelch]

I almost never convert in any direction other than from markdown to something else.

so, I was wondering whether it may make sense to take a parser from somewhere and roll my own output generator. It could allow me to fix some aspects that are minor nuisances in pandoc to me (not others), such as my desire to have cleaner tables that I can style myself; or \begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{\linethickness}\end{center} being a macro that I can override with, say, a \clearpage. besides, I don't want to learn Haskell. I can barely remember C and perl.

There is this amazing dialect, commonmark, with a reference implementation in cmark (C), and it is coauthored by the very same jgm who authored this amazing package called pandoc. thanks, jgm.

So I am curious:

• is pandoc using cmark? Things like table output look very different.
• is there any reason not to use CommonMark?

regards, /iaw

[jgm]

Pandoc doesn't use cmark, because we don't like to depend on C libraries. Instead, we use commonmark-hs (also by me). It implements the same algorithm as cmark and should agree on the output, but it also implements a whole host of extensions. To use this with pandoc, use -f commonmark. Or if you want extended versions, -f commonmark_x or -f gfm.

[iandol]

@iwelch -- why would commonmark solve any of your output problems? Pandoc's default markdown has many more extensions for conversion customisation than commonmark does (commonmark doesn't even support textual tables, I think you just embed HTML code?). Pandoc supports templates as a non-programmer way to tweak conversions, alongside code solutions like Lua filters and writers to go one step further. You could try to use an LLM model to write a Lua filter for you?

[rnwst]

Relevant documentation: Lua filters and Custom writers.

[iwelch]

hmmm...with LLMs, I might actually master this, especially with relevant docs.

I wish commonmark would also endorse some default table format that would become standard --- with better feature mappings to both html (thead,tbody,th,td,etc.) and latex tables (default column alignment, multicolumns). Something. Anything...

> | col1+2 aligned   | col3 |
> |-----------:|----:|------|
> |: override  |     |      |

JGM is the most respected markdown figure in this community. Would be great if he endorsed the table that rules them all...

/iaw

[iwelch]

JGM --- can I suggest making the latex output a little more macro-template-oriented? Like, instead of outputting center and ---- etc., defining a macro \centerhline that can then be overridden by a latex style file?

I don't have a solution, but it would be lovely if the tabular output were also less hand-formatted and more style-content separated, with styling provided by a customizable pandoctabular environment.