Happy 20th birthday, Pandoc!

One of the bragging points of digital information is that it’s supposed to be possible to convert it from one format to another. Actually doing the conversion is often where theory runs headlong into practice and gets a concussion. Thankfully, when I need to convert text documents from one format into another, whether for myself or as part of an application, I’ve been able to hand the job to Pandoc. When people ask me “What is Pandoc?”, I reply with a Star Trek-y summary: “It’s the Universal Translator for text document formats.” Need to take a LaTeX file and turn it into a PDF or Epub ebook? No prob. Got documents on a topic from different sources in different formats and need them all converted to HTML? Easy-peasy. Are you writing an application that takes documents in multiple formats as input and needs to extract the information from them? Have your application call Pandoc to convert those docs into a format it can read. Want a sense of the formats that Pandoc can translate from…