Pandoc

The universal markup converter

Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library. It can read Markdown, CommonMark, PHP Markdown Extra, GitHub-Flavored Markdown, MultiMarkdown, and (subsets of) Textile, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, TWiki markup, Haddock markup, OPML, Emacs Org mode, DocBook, txt2tags, EPUB, ODT and Word docx; and it can write plain text, Markdown, CommonMark, PHP Markdown Extra, GitHub-Flavored Markdown, MultiMarkdown, reStructuredText, XHTML, HTML5, LaTeX (including beamer slide shows), ConTeXt, RTF, OPML, DocBook, OpenDocument, ODT, Word docx, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, DokuWiki markup, ZimWiki markup, Haddock markup, EPUB (v2 or v3), FictionBook2, Textile, groff man pages, Emacs Org mode, AsciiDoc, InDesign ICML, TEI Simple, and Slidy, Slideous, DZSlides, reveal.js or S5 HTML slide shows. It can also produce PDF output on systems where LaTeX, ConTeXt, or wkhtmltopdf is installed.

Pandoc’s enhanced version of Markdown includes syntax for footnotes, tables, flexible ordered lists, definition lists, fenced code blocks, superscripts and subscripts, strikeout, metadata blocks, automatic tables of contents, embedded LaTeX math, citations, and Markdown inside HTML block elements. (These enhancements, described further under Pandoc’s Markdown, can be disabled using the markdown_strict input or output format.)

In contrast to most existing tools for converting Markdown to HTML, which use regex substitutions, pandoc has a modular design: it consists of a set of readers, which parse text in a given format and produce a native representation of the document, and a set of writers, which convert this native representation into a target format. Thus, adding an input or output format requires only adding a reader or writer.

Because pandoc’s intermediate representation of a document is less expressive than many of the formats it converts between, one should not expect perfect conversions between every format and every other. Pandoc attempts to preserve the structural elements of a document, but not formatting details such as margin size. And some document elements, such as complex tables, may not fit into pandoc’s simple document model. While conversions from pandoc’s Markdown to all formats aspire to be perfect, conversions from formats more expressive than pandoc’s Markdown can be expected to be lossy.

Installing

Here’s how to install pandoc.

Documentation

Pandoc’s website contains a full User’s Guide. It is also available here as pandoc-flavored Markdown. The website also contains some examples of the use of pandoc and a limited online demo.

Contributing

Pull requests, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome. Please make sure to read the contributor guidelines before opening a new issue.

License

© 2006-2016 John MacFarlane (jgm@berkeley.edu). Released under the GPL, version 2 or greater. This software carries no warranty of any kind. (See COPYRIGHT for full copyright and warranty notices.)