I’ve recently ran into an issue with using markdown to draft papers for my dissertation. Per APA Ver 6, double spaces are expected after punctuation to “improve readability.” However, I’m using pandoc to convert my drafts to docx, the standard that my school expects. I spent way too much time learning just enough haskell to determine that pandoc doesn’t detect the use of double spaces and cannot easily be modified to both detect and write out double spaces without breaking most of the tests. I eventually had to modify another tool (https://github.com/jamessantiago/DocxMerge) in my workflow to add the the spaces back.
But what’s the alternative? Commonmark and Asciidoc don’t get my use case to a working state. Toolchains for specific use cases will always be a thing and I expect this to be the case for many developers with strict documentation requirements. There’s always that one customer (or school) who just has to have documents in word with double spacing after punctuation.
I’ve recently ran into an issue with using markdown to draft papers for my dissertation. Per APA Ver 6, double spaces are expected after punctuation to “improve readability.” However, I’m using pandoc to convert my drafts to docx, the standard that my school expects. I spent way too much time learning just enough haskell to determine that pandoc doesn’t detect the use of double spaces and cannot easily be modified to both detect and write out double spaces without breaking most of the tests. I eventually had to modify another tool (https://github.com/jamessantiago/DocxMerge) in my workflow to add the the spaces back.
But what’s the alternative? Commonmark and Asciidoc don’t get my use case to a working state. Toolchains for specific use cases will always be a thing and I expect this to be the case for many developers with strict documentation requirements. There’s always that one customer (or school) who just has to have documents in word with double spacing after punctuation.