Pandoc and Markdown in 5 Minutes

Lightning Talk @ Open Source Open Mic

Dirk Eddelbuettel

26 October 2017

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Outline

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Plan for today

• Pandoc• Markdoc• Text processing

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Pandoc

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Pandoc in a nutshell

• The Swiss army knife for text conversion

• From anything to anything

• Rather widely used

• Well documented, many options

• Written in Haskell (!!) by head of UCBerkeley philosophy dept (!!)

• Very scriptable in the Unix tradition;extensible via pandoc-filters

Source: Pandoc website

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Markdown

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Key Points

• Invented by John Gruber of Daring Fireball

• Very widely used as an easy markup language

• It is everywhere now (GitHub, StackOverflow, …)

• Might get standardised (commonmark, GitHub-flavored, …)

• Fits with Pandoc like peanut butter and jelly

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Example

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Integration

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RMarkdown

• Integration with R via rmarkdown package• Extensive documentation by RStudio• Integration with R (and Python, SQL, …) code chunks• Dynamic and computable documents that auto-update

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RMarkdown

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Demo

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Our ‘Template’

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Our ‘Deployment’

#!/bin/sh

for i in 1 2 3; dormdfile=”demo${i}.Rmd”pdffile=”demo${i}.pdf”echo ${rmdfile}cp -vax demo.Rmd ${rmdfile}Rscript -e 'rmarkdown::render(”'${rmdfile}'”)'test -f ${pdffile} && xdg-open ${pdffile}

done

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Result

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Summary

Pandoc

• rocks as very versatile to/from anything converter• highly scriptable, widely available

Markdown

• has won the markup languages fight• is literally everywhere, dialects exists though

RMarkdown

• highly customizable• highly expressive

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Contact

Emaildirk@eddelbuettel.com

Websitehttp://dirk.eddelbuettel.com

Twitter@eddelbuettel

GitHubeddelbuettel

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