![]() On Ubuntu Linux, you can install Pandoc by opening a terminal window and running: sudo apt install pandoc If you’re not, head over to William Shunn’s excellent page on the topic. You’re reading this article, so you’re probably already familiar with the standard manuscript format for non-fiction and short-stories. ![]() It took a while to figure out, because I couldn’t find anyone else who had done it Pandoc is popular with academics and web journalists, but so far few straight-up “writers” haven’t adopted it. So I set out to get Pandoc to convert my markdown into Open Document files, and put it into standard manuscript format at the same time. But using Pandoc like this isn’t much of an improvement over the above-mentioned online conversion apps, when it comes to converting and formatting manuscripts. It’s easy to set up Pandoc and start converting stuff using its default settings. In this article, when I say Pandoc I’m referring to the command-line tool. It can do just about anything, but good luck getting it to do anything other than the simplest conversions when you’re getting started.Īctually, it’s a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library. Pandoc is an open-source document conversion supertool - the gas-powered 94-tool Swiss army knife of the document conversion world. But I’d inevitably make little changes while formatting the manuscript, and then bigger revisions, and pretty soon I was at the 36th draft, with my editing history split between markdown and Word - making diffing and version control impossible.īy automating this process, my manuscripts can stay in Markdown, and I can have a manuscript ready to submit to any journal in seconds.ĭespite the fact that spending time automating things is more interesting than spending time doing them, as all nerds know and ignore, and as explained by the xkcd #1319, it does not necessarily follow that automating things is any net savings … for the person doing it:īut making use of the automated workflows poor gullible nerds like me have come up with is a legitimate laboursaving device and since I’ve already wasted more time automating it that I would have ever spent converting manuscripts - even if I churned out pieces as fast as Issac Asimov - the only way I can make up for my lost time is by saving yours. To do this, I would upload my markdown to whatever document converter app was the top Google result of the day and then fuss over the formatting of the resulting document to get it to comply to the standard manuscript guidelines. I write short-stories and essays in markdown, but many magazines and literary journals only accept manuscripts as Word documents or PDFs, which forces me to convert my source text into a myriad of (often obsolete) formats every time I want to submit to one of these journals. In this tutorial I’ll show how to convert manuscripts written in markdown into a variety of industry-standard formats, automatically, using Pandoc.
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