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LAC-Tech • today at 2:28 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

At the risk of making a fool of myself in-front of the rest of the class, I will come out and admit I don't know what the article is talking about.

> Last summer I spent a lot of time with Typst (at that point v0.11) and Pandoc, working on a flexible and reusable workflow to typeset markdown-formatted articles to PDF.

I understand that Typst is a markup language that can output a pdf file (big Typst fan btw).

I understand Pandoc is a thing that transforms documents of one kind to documents of another, ie markdown to html.

But the author wants to "typeset markdown-formatted article to PDF". Which makes me wonder what this has to do with typst at all.

Replies

__mharrison__ • today at 4:57 AM

I'll give an example.

I write Python, software engineering, and data science books in Jupyter. (Because I want both text and code). I've written my own toolchain (multiple times, don't ask, yes, I've tried the one you're thinking of and it didn't work for me).

I need to convert the notebooks into chapters in my books (PDF so I can print them). In the past, I used code to convert to LaTeX. (It was horrible).

Now, I use code to convert the Jupyter file to markdown, then (I use pandoc too) to typst. (It is 100x better than LaTeX).

(I also use pandoc to convert markdown to epub).

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thornewolf • today at 2:56 AM

The author explain this in more detail in the article; I also was initially confused. The key details come from their broken down pandoc command. Specifically, these two flags:

  --pdf-engine=typst
  -V template=article.typ
Despite the input content being a .md file, we see that the .md contents populate the .typ file. Pandoc then understands how to convert the populated .typ file into a .pdf. The author also notes in their hyperlinked .typ document where the body content is placed:

  // THIS IS THE ACTUAL BODY:
What is not clear to me is the actual mechanism that tells pandoc where to place the body contents in the template. I presume it's some "magic" from the pandoc docs. The pandoc templates documentation[1] does reveal to us that `-V` is setting a variable called `template`. I don't have pandoc locally, but from another post[2] from the same author and a chatgpt query, it seems that the `body` symbol in the template is the chosen substitution symbol.

[1]: https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/6-templates.html

[2]: https://imaginarytext.ca/posts/2024/pandoc-typst-tutorial/

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