Albert Krewinkel

When pandoc is used in larger pipelines, e.g. in combination with Sphinx, it can be useful to pack everything up into one neat container. One option is to base the container on a pandoc image like pandoc/core, but this may be difficult due to other dependencies.

Install pandoc in custom Docker images

Pandoc’s Markdown allows for “fancy lists”, i.e., lists with different styles used for the marker of ordered list items. E.g., the list (I)  primus (#)  secundus (#)  tertius  uses uppercase roman numerals and double parentheses for the markers. It gets rendered as Continuations   The fancy lists feature also allows to continue lists after an intermediate paragraph: i.   one #.   another Interruption; not part of any list. iii.

Auto-numbered list continuations

Quarto makes it very easy to publish a website via GitHub Pages: It is as simple as running quarto publish gh-pages. Here we explore a slightly different method that uses a GitHub Action to publish the website automatically every time it is updated. Classic GitHub Pages   The classic way to publish a website via GitHub pages is to maintain a separate branch gh-pages.

Quarto Website with GitHub Actions

Spam just doesn’t die. Every major mail provider has really good spam filters in place, as do the common mail clients. Nontheless, there seem to be enough people reading – and acting on – spam mail to make it a profitable business. No matter how much we hate it, we need to deal with spam. Better than having a good spam filter is not to be spammed in the first place.

Avoid Mail Harvesting through Address Munging

Sitemaps are an easy way to list all pages that a search engine should crawl and index. Quarto supports the standard, XML based Sitemap Protocol, although that fact is a bit hidden in the docs.  Quarto will automatically produce a sitemap if the website’s URL is given as site-url property: website:   title: tarleb   site-url: 'https://tarleb.com'   site-path: '/'  The URL will contain a colon :, which is why the YAML value must be put in quotes.

Generating a sitemap with Quarto

Santa sighted deeply as worry and uncertainty gave way, leaving a feeling of relieve and accomplishment. The year was one of the worst he’d seen so far. Large numbers of his helpers were moving from the North Pole to Antarctica to satisfy their ambient temperature preferences. There would be many telecommuting Elves this year, and each helper enjoyed additional autonomy. Tying everything together was a challenge.

Santa’s Little Lua Scripts

A question came up on the Lua mailing list, asking whether there was a PDF version of the Lua manual. This is, of course, the home domain of pandoc, and I got nerd-sniped into producing a PDF (and ePUB) version of the manual. This is a good opportunity to showcase some pandoc features. The post describes the process of going from an HTML web page to a PDF file via LaTeX and pandoc. We will see how to quickly convert documents with pandoc;

PDF Version of the Lua Manual

My first exposure to Lua has been as a pandoc user, and adding new Lua features to pandoc turned Lua into one of my favorite languages. In this post I will take a look at pandoc, the universal document converter, and explore how one can script and extend it with Lua. Pandoc includes a Lua interpreter since 2012, but the integration of Lua has been expanded significantly with the latest 2.0 release.

Extending pandoc with Lua

Having a good working environment is vital for feeling comfortable being productive. This extends to computational tools and the command shell is an integral part of the daily work for many of us. It’s a good idea to configure the shell’s interface to be efficient and pleasant to use.

How to configure zsh with vi bindings and nice shortcuts

Line breaks usually have no semantic meaning within a Markdown paragraph. However, using line breaks to mark the end of a sentece can help with productivity for various reasons.
<sup>
 1
</sup>
Documents with one sentence per line are also called “ventilated prose”, and the Write the {Ascii}Docs website has a good article on that topic.

Semantic line breaks

Typst, the new writing tool, was open sourced a couple of days ago. This is right up my alley of course, and I have a couple of thoughts on it, which I share here. What is it?   Typst is a writing tool that’s described as a LaTeX alternative: it takes plain-text markup as input and can produce nice looking PDFs from that.

Typst Musings

When extending pandoc (or Quarto) with Lua filters, we interact with so-called Lua userdata objects. These objects are used to wrap document AST elements, making them accessible from Lua scripts. They mostly behave like normal Lua tables. This post is intended as a quick overview, listing interesting properties of userdata objects.

Haskell usedata objects

Setting the document font this way works for ConTeXt, LaTeX, and HTML output. The fonts used in docx or odt output must be controlled with the reference document instead. The default LaTeX engine is pdflatex, which only supports TeX’s own font format and cannot use the TrueType or OpenType fonts installed on the system. However, XeLaTeX was written with that in mind; switching to that engine allows to specify any font available on the system.

Document font

Last night was the night of this year’s MetaNook. It was the fourth time that the local hackers, most notably MetaMeute and Chaotikum, joined forces to organize a night full of beginner-friendly introductions, advanced tech talks, and project presentations. My talk contribution this year was a brief introduction in the “magic” of the command-line.

MetaNook2014 – Command Line Talk

The zeitkraut server is configured to work with IPv6. For quite some time now, I’ve been seeing some strange errors in my log files. If you’ve been noticing something similar, here is what’s going on and how to prevent the messages from appearing. The Problem   Everything works as expected, except for some weird messages in the logs: rt6_redirect: source isn't a valid nexthop for redirect target  Not even startpage was of much help.

rt6_redirect: source isn’t a valid nexthop for redirect target

A couple of friends and I just discussed the idea of Russian Process Roulette: Everybody starts a little program which kills processes at random. The winner is the one whose computer remains usable the longest. Is this crazy? Yes. Immature? Sure. Fun? Definitely. Adviced against to actually play unless the consequences are fully understood? That too. Playing the game is as simple as starting a command like the following: while sleep 600;

Russian Process Roulette

One of the many great things about free and open source software and the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem are the simple yet powerful tools available. The possibilities enabled by almost trivial programs are incredible. A very positive side effect this has on me is that I like to go and explore technologies with the tools at my disposal.

Exploring HTTP Headers with netcat

These are the resources that I’d want to have if I was to learn about pandoc (the universal document converter) all over again: Installing  latest release The GitHub release page has installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Docker images  There are three types of pandoc Docker images: minimal – very small, just the bare pandoc binary; core – includes pandoc-crossref and helpers programs, e.g. those used by pandoc for SVG image conversion;