Pandoc is a utility written by philosopher John MacFarlane for converting files from one markup format to another. For example, you might write a document in a plain text format then convert it to HTML. I’ll be giving an introduction to Pandoc and Markdown in Saturday’s plain-text workshop. But for this unconference session, I’d like to propose a hacking session that will create some software to solve a problem using Pandoc.

If we have some people who know LaTeX, I propose that we create a Pandoc template to meet the requirements of the standard academic paper that undergraduates have to hand in. While the standard Pandoc templates are great, the general expectation for academic drafts are that they will look like a Turabian or MLA paper, so let’s make a template for that purpose.

If we have some people who know Ruby  or shell scripting, I propose that we figure out a way to make EPUB books from the files for a blog or website published using Jekyll. This might take the form of a Jekyll plugin written in Ruby, like Anthologize but for Jekyll, or a shell script that stands outside of Jekyll. I’m interested in generating EPUBs for each issue of a journal (code here), so I have a real world example we can hack.

By the end of the session we will have made a small but complete product to launch into the world.