First blog

Originally written: 2020 July 16

Last edited: 2020 July 19

Hello everybody, this is a sample test blog entry.

This was written in Markdown, and then transformed using Pandoc.

Pandoc

I feel obliged to put some content, so here are some interesting facts about pandoc:

It's written in haskell.
It's written by a philosophy professor, John MacFarlane, one at Cal, none less.
Pandoc uses an intermediate representation between formats. This means that, for m input formats and n output formats, it only requires m+n pieces to program, instead of m*n formats (similar to, say, llvm). This would suggest that the pandoc intermediate format is incredibly expressive -- perhaps this could even be somewhat a base for other editors/formats?

EDIT (2020 July 19): Quoting the man page of pandoc:
Because pandoc's intermediate representation of a document is less expressive than many of the formats it converts between, one should not expect perfect conversions between every format and every other. Pandoc attempts to preserve the structural elements of a document, but not formatting details such as margin size. And some document elements, such as complex tables, may not fit into pandoc's simple document model. While conversions from pandoc's Markdown to all formats aspire to be perfect, conversions from formats more expressive than pandoc's Markdown can be expected to be lossy.
It currently does not support .hwp file extensions, which would be a great boon to Korean unix users, as libreoffice does not work with .hwp files currently...