Pandoc is a

free-software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

document converter, widely used as a writing tool (especially by scholars)
-
-
- and as a basis for publishing workflows. It was created by John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

Functionality

Pandoc dubs itself a "markup format" converter. It can take a document in one of the supported formats and convert only its markup to another format. Maintaining the look and feel of the document is not a priority. Plug-ins for custom formats can also be written in

Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...

, which has been used to create an exporting tool for the

Journal Article Tag Suite The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is an XML format used to describe scientific literature published online. It is a technical standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and approved by the American National S ...

, for example. An included

CiteProc CiteProc is the generic name for programs that produce formatted bibliographies and citations based on the metadata of the cited objects and the formatting instructions provided by Citation Style Language (CSL) styles. The first CiteProc implementa ...

option allows pandoc to use bibliographic data from

reference management software Reference management software, citation management software, or bibliographic management software is software for scholars and authors to use for recording and utilising bibliographic citations (references) as well as managing project reference ...

in any of five formats:

BibTeX BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. The BibTeX tool is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The name is a portmanteau ...

BibLaTeX Biber is a bibliography information processing program that works in conjunction with the LaTeX package BibLaTeX and offers full Unicode support. Biber is a widely used replacement for the BibTeX software. Both generate a bibliography in LaTeX, b ...

, CSL JSON or CSL YAML, or RIS. The information is automatically transformed into a

citation A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of ...

in various styles (such as APA,

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

, or MLA) using an implementation of the

Citation Style Language The Citation Style Language (CSL) is an open XML-based language to describe the formatting of citations and bibliographies. Reference management programs using CSL include Zotero, Mendeley and Papers. The Pandoc lightweight document conversion s ...

. This allows the program to serve as a simpler alternative to

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

for producing academic writing.

Supported file formats

Input formats

The input format with the most support is an extended version of

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown is ...

. Notwithstanding, pandoc can also read in the following formats: * Creole *

DocBook DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software, but it can be used for any other sort of documentation. As a semantic languag ...

EPUB EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes styled ''ePub''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones ...

FictionBook FictionBook is an open XML-based e-book format which originated and gained popularity in Russia. FictionBook files have the filename extension. Some readers also support ZIP-compressed FictionBook files ( or ) The FictionBook format does not ...

(FB2) *

Haddock The haddock (''Melanogrammus aeglefinus'') is a saltwater ray-finned fish from the family Gadidae, the true cods. It is the only species in the monotypic genus ''Melanogrammus''. It is found in the North Atlantic Ocean and associated seas where ...

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

* Jira wiki markup *

(JATS) *

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

Lightweight markup language A lightweight markup language (LML), also termed a simple or humane markup language, is a markup language with simple, unobtrusive syntax. It is designed to be easy to write using any generic text editor and easy to read in its raw form. Lightwei ...

man A man is an adult male human. Prior to adulthood, a male human is referred to as a boy (a male child or adolescent). Like most other male mammals, a man's genome usually inherits an X chromosome from the mother and a Y chromos ...

: Strict, CommonMark,

GitHub Flavored Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown is ...

(GFM),

MultiMarkdown MultiMarkdown is a lightweight markup language created by Fletcher T. Penney as an extension of the Markdown format. It supports additional features not available in plain Markdown syntax. There is also a text editor with the same name that suppo ...

(MMD) and

Markdown Extra Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown is ...

(PHP Extra) variants *

OpenDocument The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics and using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed wi ...

(ODT) *

OPML OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines (defined as "a tree, where each node contains a set of named attributes with string values"). Originally developed by UserLand as a native file format for the outliner appli ...

Office Open XML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version a ...

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms includin ...

variant *

Org-mode Org Mode (also: ''org-mode''; ) is a document editing, formatting, and organizing mode, designed for notes, planning, and authoring within the free software text editor Emacs. The name is used to encompass plain text files ("org files") that incl ...

reStructuredText reStructuredText (RST, ReST, or reST) is a file format for textual data used primarily in the Python programming language community for technical documentation. It is part of the Docutils project of the Python Doc-SIG (Documentation Special Inte ...

Textile Textile is an umbrella term that includes various fiber-based materials, including fibers, yarns, filaments, threads, different fabric types, etc. At first, the word "textiles" only referred to woven fabrics. However, weaving is not the ...

txt2tags txt2tags is a document generator software that uses a lightweight markup language. txt2tags is free software under GNU General Public License. Written in Python, it can export documents to several formats including: HTML, XHTML, SGML, LaTeX, Lou ...

(t2t) *

Wiki markup A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki ...

, Muse,

TikiWiki Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware or simply Tiki, originally known as TikiWiki, is a free and open source software, free and open source Wiki-based content management system and online office suite written primarily in PHP and distributed under the GNU Les ...

TWiki TWiki is a Perl-based structured wiki application, typically used to run a collaboration platform, knowledge or document management system, a knowledge base, or team portal. Users can create wiki pages using the TWiki Markup Language, and develo ...

and

Vimwiki A personal wiki is wiki software that allows individual users to organize information on their desktop or mobile computing devices in a manner similar to community wikis, but without collaborative software or multiple users. Personal wiki softwa ...

variants

Output formats

Pandoc can create files in the following output formats, which are not necessarily the same set of formats as the input formats: *

AsciiDoc AsciiDoc is a human-readable document format, semantically equivalent to DocBook XML, but using plain-text mark-up conventions. AsciiDoc documents can be created using any text editor and read “as-is”, or rendered to HTML or any other for ...

ConTeXt Context may refer to: * Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary Computing * Context (computing), the virtual environment required to su ...

: Versions 4 and 5 *

: Versions 2 and 3 *

(FB2) *

: HTML4 and

HTML5 HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. It is the fifth and final major HTML version that is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML ...

variants, respectively compliant with XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML Strict *

InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, ...

ICML * Jira wiki markup *

(JATS) *

: Strict, CommonMark,

(GFM),

(MMD) and

(PHP Extra) variants *

(ODT/ODF) *

and

Microsoft PowerPoint Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoi ...

variants *

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

(needs a third-party add-on like

, pdfroff, wkhtmltopdf, weasyprint or prince) *

Plain text In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.). It may also include a limit ...

Rich Text Format ) As an example, the following RTF code would be rendered as follows: This is some bold text. Character encoding A standard RTF file can only consist of 7-bit ASCII characters, but can use escape sequences to encode other characters. Th ...

(RTF) * TEI *

Texinfo Texinfo is a typesetting syntax used for generating documentation in both on-line and printed form (creating filetypes as , , , etc., and its own hypertext format, ) with a single source file. It is implemented by a computer program released as fr ...

* Web-based slideshows: LaTeX Beamer, Slideous, Slidy, DZSlides, reveal.js and S5 variantsSee as an example Th
source file
is written in Markdown. *

DokuWiki DokuWiki is a wiki application licensed under GPLv2 and written in the PHP programming language. It works on plain text files and thus does not need a database. Its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki. It is often recommended as a more ...

Muse In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses ( grc, Μοῦσαι, Moûsai, el, Μούσες, Múses) are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the ...

and

variants

References

External links