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I see quite some pandoc / Markdown questions recently. It fits the pipeline I use, so I'd like to share / post some questions with canned answers. However, no one asks me for that.

Next, more grave issue: It is more about interoperation of LaTeX, pandoc, make, and what not. Basically, it is borderline with "programming" SO.

So, should I? More generally: are pandoc topics welcome at TeX.SX? They involve some sort of LaTeX generation and pandoc is often used as a front to LaTeX. But there is more to it. I would think that generating HTML from Markdown is off-topic. Where is the line? Do we want to deal with more pandoc / Markdown / generated LaTeX questions in the future?

Directions in which this might go:

  • Yes, please do talk about pandoc.
  • This is answered 2000 times on SO already.
  • We are a forum for LaTeX wizards, not some weaklings who cannot even write \emph on their own!
  • pandoc to LaTeX and interoperation is allowed, pandoc to anything else is forbidden.
  • We are not snobby, but all this pandoc thing is really off-topic.

I am more seeking after the spirit of the community than a quote of the rules.

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  • 1
    Regarding the self-answering part: of course this is perfectly acceptable and even encouraged by the site interface, but with self-answered questions there is a risk that the Q&A pair is actually not a good fit for the site, see meta.stackexchange.com/a/17468 and meta.stackexchange.com/a/172618. In short: make sure the question and answer are specific, reproducible, and you have reason to believe that somebody (other than yourself) might have this question at some point and would like to find an answer on our site.
    – Marijn
    Nov 16, 2020 at 9:16
  • This also sort of implies that if a question is asked and answered already at SO or SuperUser then it may not have much added value to post it also at TeX.SE - I'm not saying that you are planning to do that but just in case, cross-site duplicates are fine for 'real' questions but for self-answered questions this is less useful I think.
    – Marijn
    Nov 16, 2020 at 9:19

1 Answer 1

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I think that pandoc questions that use LaTeX as the intermediary or output format are definitely on topic, and there are quite a few of us here who are also pandoc users, and so these sorts of questions are usually answered quite happily.

General pandoc questions, however (e.g. conversions between document types that use no LaTeX) are likely to be off topic, as in the linked meta question you mention.

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