MultiMarkdown vs. Pandoc?

Sönke

Recently there have been some discussions in the forum about Multimarkdown. I know that Sascha and Christian use the Citation Style [12][#bla2020]. And it makes sense to use a standard citation method.

My question is: Do Pandoc and MMD do ‚the same thing‘: converting text documents in other Formats? Pandoc seems to be much more versatile.

Am I missing a key component of MMD?

Thank you for the help.

zk_1000

Pandoc Markdown is pretty much only supported by pandoc. Multimarkdown is supported by many tools, including Pandoc.

Sönke

Ah I see... thank you.

Right now I have a workflow that includes pandoc citations [@authorYear, p.123]. I write in Markdown and export with pandoc.

Would you recommend using the MMD Format and using it because it is supported by many more tools?

Privid

Pandoc support for academic citations is fairly robust, and it can convert to Word and Latex (also supported in Zettlr), so I mostly just use Pandoc. I think that's the only substantial difference anyway, and so far, I haven't really stumbled on any drastic incompatibilities.

argonsnorts

I have recently found that MMD citations are not recognized by pandoc-citeproc (a Pandoc filter that pulls citation info from a .bib file and formats it according to .csl style sheet).

So when I write chapters/articles that I want to convert to docx (for sharing with colleagues, submitting to journals, etc.), I have to use Pandoc-style citations, instead of MMD. (Slightly annoying, because the notes in my ZK use MMD-style...)

Or, maybe I am mistaken about that particular incompatibility? Anyone know?

Vinho

@argonsnorts said:
I have recently found that MMD citations are not recognized by pandoc-citeproc (a Pandoc filter that pulls citation info from a .bib file and formats it according to .csl style sheet).

If what you mean is that MMD citations are not converted into Pandoc citations by Pandoc, I have made the same experience:

I start with this file, called testpdcit.md:

# Title

This is a citation in MMD-style: [Ch. 1][#Millikan1984]

## References

[#Millikan1984]: Ruth Garrett Millikan (1984): *Language, thought, and other biological categories*. [Book] MIT Press.

Now I run the following command in Terminal:
pandoc -f markdown_mmd -t markdown -s -o pdcit.md testpdcit.md

The resulting file pdcit.md:

Title
=====

This is a citation in MMD-style: \[Ch. 1\]\[\#Millikan1984\]

References
----------

\[\#Millikan1984\]: Ruth Garrett Millikan (1984): *Language, thought,
and other biological categories*. \[Book\] MIT Press.

So instead of converting [Ch. 1][#Millikan1984] to [@Millikan1984, Ch. 1], it just changes the markup of my headings and escapes all the angled brackets (which is slightly annoying and I don't see the point of)...

What one could try to get from MMD citations to Pandoc citations is to write a script or Keyboard Maestro macro that uses RegEx searches to replace all the citations in MMD style with citations in Pandoc style in a file.

Will

@Vinho, I'm not too experienced with pandoc but don't you have to point your .bib file at the pandoc command?

See Pandoc Manual the section titled "Citation rendering." the -C, --citeproc option.

Maybe I'm confused.

Vinho

@Will That would be the next step, when I want to render the citations in Pandoc Markdown (the citations that look like [@Millikan1984, p. 23]) and create a bibliography at the end of the document. The rendering can't be done with citations in MultiMarkdown.

ctietze

Oh you're right, one apparently needs to convert the reference definition: https://groups.google.com/g/pandoc-discuss/c/omAoTI1fAk0/m/BcF0Ul4OAgAJ

Sönke

So if someone like me, who has to convert hand in my papers in .docx, MMD does not seem to be an easy/obvious choice, am I right?

I do like the mmd syntax and simplicity in the plain text space, but when it comes to converting into .docx it seems cumbersome. Or am I missing something again?

Vinho

@Sönke said:
So if someone like me, who has to convert hand in my papers in .docx, MMD does not seem to be an easy/obvious choice, am I right?

I do like the mmd syntax and simplicity in the plain text space, but when it comes to converting into .docx it seems cumbersome. Or am I missing something again?

It just depends on how you want your citations to be managed/rendered. If you are happy with inserting bibliography data more manually like @ctietze and @Sascha do and you also don’t mind that the bibliography entries are mixed in with the footnotes at the end of the document, there isn’t a problem with MMD. If you want bibliographies to be auto-created and have a separate section at the end of the document, I would choose Pandoc Markdown. As I indicated above, you could also create a script to convert MMD into PM or the other way round if you want to be able to switch between the two.

ctietze

I haven't tried to typeset a book with pure pandoc, yet.

With MMD, I go from MMD to LaTeX and then fine-tune there, and typeset LaTeX to PDF. mmd2pdf's default behavior of lumping together references and footnotes in a similar style doesn't cut it, and I usually want more data from my BibTeX bibliography. So it's really all tailored towards LaTeX in the end and MMD is just a nice writing language, but it's just a stepping stone.