Showing posts with label pandoc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pandoc. Show all posts

Sunday, July 5, 2009

texmath

John McFarlane announced the texmath Haskell library for converting LaTeX formula markup to MathML. This is great - see the demo! I hope it makes it into the next pandoc release.

I am not sure how MathML fares with the recent IE versions, this used to be a problem..

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Pandoc. Can we use it ouside of Haskell?

Pandoc is great. It a Markdown implementation on steroids, supporting a number of different input/output formats besides HTML, such as TeX. And yet it is Markdown: the source still looks great, just like plain email! As an extra bonus, Pandoc, being written in Haskell and compiled to native code, works a lot faster than many alternative markup language processors.

The problem is.. It is a Haskell library. If it is indeed the great software it seems to be, one would want to use it from scripting languages (PHP, Python, Perl), OCaml, Schemes, Java, .NET and so on.

The first step towards that is to bind it to C.

Good news: yes, it is possible, and Pandoc DLL or Shared Object builds on both Windows and Linux. It is callable from other languages (currently C and PLT Scheme).

Bad news: the binary is large, as GHC compiles everything, including its runtime, into it. The binding is untested, poorly configured and very incomplete. But, well, it is open-source and will get better with time. You can see for yourself: libpandoc