simonbos / pandoc-text

Custom pandoc writer with (almost) no markup

pandoc-text

A Lua custom writer for Pandoc generating a plain text file with as few markup as possible. The goal of the custom writer is to generate a plain text file that contains all displayed text but doesn't confuse spelling and grammar checkers. To this purpose, following rules are applied:

• The abstract is added at the beginning of the document.
• All inline equations, inline code and unresolved links are replaced by respectively Xi, Ci and Li (with i corresponding to the i'th appearance).
• Footnotes are displayed in the text as ^i (with i corresponding to the i'th appearance) and the content is appended at the end of the document.
• Images and tables are removed and their captions are appended at the end of the document.

Installation

Just download the file pandoc-text.lua and put it in a convenient location. (Pandoc includes a lua interpreter, so lua need not be installed separately.)

Usage

To convert the LaTeX file examples/example.tex, use the following command:

pandoc --citeproc \
       --csl https://www.zotero.org/styles/ieee \
       --bibliography examples/example.bib \
       -f latex \
       -t pandoc-text.lua \
       -o example.txt \
       examples/example.tex

One-liner: pandoc --citeproc --csl https://www.zotero.org/styles/ieee --bibliography examples/example.bib -f latex -t pandoc-text.lua -o example.txt examples/example.tex

Known issues

• In LaTeX, captions of tikzpicture environments inside figure environments are parsed incorrectly. Therefore, these do not show up in the resulting document. See: jgm/pandoc#5084