I am sure hope somebody™ already thought of this. Feel free to advertise your project here.
P.S.: Image transcription:
Patrick from SpongeBob SquarePants gesturing to the left with open hands:
Somebody should take document type conversion from Pandoc and version control from Git
Patrick gesturing to the right in a pushing motion:
And build a frontend around it
Shameless plug for Pandoc because I love it
That scalable vector graphic on the page shows source document type on the left and target type on the right. TL;DL: It converts about two dozen document types into about three dozen document types.
P.S.E.G.: PDF ← Markdown ←→ HTML → PDF
P.P.S: Where are my manners? Image transcription added to post.
I’ve been using Quarto a lot for Data Science work and it uses Pandoc under the hood I recall.
Not sure what you’re envisioning by Pandoc + git, but the RStudio IDE has a git integration and a WYSIWYM Quarto editor.
Quarto looks quite interesting indeed, thanks for pointing it out!
For those interested it’s an “Open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc”
https://quarto.org/
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli
Like a data format inhabiting the centre of that conversion graph they have on their website, basically a superset of the available input types, that is then version controlled by git, and can be exported to any of the output formats, in a neat frontend that removes all that complexity from me. :D
This! I want office that just uses markdown/latex and pandoc under the hood to output PDF documents
Haha, kind of. However conversion between all these formats is lossy in some directions and I don’t know of any software that integrates version control of documents by default (not saying there are none).
P.S.: Yes I know, https://xkcd.com/927/
So what’s stopping you from putting your LaTeX files into a git repo and building them into a pdf when needed?
What’s a good Latex editor that abstracts the formatting behind buttons and doesn’t need you to learn Latex?
am I crazy or is this just a markdown renderer
Well every one already recommended latex or markdown.
I would also recommend typst, it’s a modern latex alternative easy to make templates and a markdown like syntax, none of all the backslash keywords that I somehow always forget.
I made a template a while back when I had to make report, since I had a professor that disliked the markdown look of previous ones.
A bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, you make a few templates and write on them just like markdown with custom alias and whatnot.
Typst is fucking amazing. LaTeX is powerful but just takes too much effort to use for large part of the population to the point that I just can’t recommend it to most people outside STEM. Typst is consistent, easier to use, faster, and collaborative. With no nonsensical error messages, broken builds, and technical debt - I can actually recommend it to most.
