Zettelkasten Forum


MultiMarkdown vs. Pandoc?

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.

Comments

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

    my first Zettel uid: 202008120915

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • @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.

  • @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.

    Will Simpson
    I must keep doing my best even though I'm a failure. My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
    kestrelcreek.com

  • edited January 2021

    @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.

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

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

  • 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?

  • edited January 2021

    @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.

  • 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.

    Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

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