A collection of support files for use with Pandoc, and specifically for helping to turn pandoc markdown files into nice HTML, LaTeX, and PDF output. These files go in your ~/.pandoc/ folder and are designed to work with the style and configuration material provided in latex-custom-kjh, socbibs, and the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences. The only real dependencies are the latex class and style files in latex-custom-kjh, however.

What's included?

• Some Pandoc templates for an article in PDF (vita LaTeX) or HTML. These go in ~/.pandoc/templates. These can be be pointed to directly with the --template= switch as appropriate. The latex.template and xelatex.template depend on the style files in latex-custom-kjh.

• I preview HTML documents generated by Pandoc using Marked, a very handy HTML live previewer for markdown files. The css files in the marked/ folder are meant to be used together with pandoc and Marked. The shell script in the marked/ folder, panmarked.sh is what I previously had Marked use as a custom processor to create its HTML. You point to it in Marked > Preferences > Behavior. In the current version of the application, Marked 2, this is not needed anymore. You still tell Marked to use pandoc as its custom processor. Go to Marked > Preferences > Behavior. Then specify the file Path to Pandoc like this (e.g.): /usr/bin/pandoc and the various switches and arguments to pandoc in the 'Args' field below it, like this (but all on one line):

  -r markdown+simple_tables+table_captions+yaml_metadata_block -w html
  -s -S --template=/Users/kjhealy/.pandoc/templates/html.template
  --filter pandoc-crossref --filter pandoc-citeproc --filter pandoc-citeproc-preamble 
  --bibliography=/Users/kjhealy/Documents/bibs/socbib-pandoc.bib
  

  Then check the box telling Marked to use this by default. Note that you may have to specify the path to any pandoc filters you use.

• The CSS files can be added in Marked > Style > Custom CSS. Marked can then use them to format the HTML output.

• In R, knitr's knit() function will turn .Rmd files into .md files. The configuration file in the knitr/ folder is an example to help you produce HTML or .tex using knitr's pandoc() helper function.

• The CSL files in the csl/ folder format the bibliography generated by pandoc and citeproc. (For simplicity we avoid dealing with biblatex directly at all.) The chicago-syllabus.csl file makes a tiny change to a standard Chicago Notes CSL file so you can use it to output citation information in the body text of a document. This makes it useful for lists of references in CVs and course syllabuses. The other two files are APSA and AJPS standard files from the main CSL styles repository.

• The Makefile in the makefile/ folder helps you generate HTML, LaTeX, and PDF output from your markdown files in a convenient way. It is meant to go in the folder where you are writing your paper. It looks for .md files in the working directory and converts them to nice HTML, PDF, and LaTeX files using the templates provided here, the style files in latex-custom-kjh, and the bibliography files in socbibs. You can of course change the bibliography and template files as desired.

• The pandoc commands produced by the current version of the Makefile include switches that invoke two pandoc filters that do additional processing on the bibliography and cross-references in the document. You should install pandoc-crossref and pandoc-citeproc-preamble to make these work.

• The md-article-starter repository is a basic project folder you can clone that gives you a template for an article written in Markdown and a Makefile to produce .html, .tex or .pdf output from it. For R users there is an rmd-article-starter as well, which begins with an .Rmd file.

Kieran Healy, @kjhealy