Twenty years of Pandoc
John MacFarlane has published a lengthy retrospective to commemorate twenty years of the Pandoc document converter. On August 3, 2006, I uploaded the first version of pandoc to my website, releasing it under the free GPL license. Pandoc 0.1 consisted of about 3000 lines of Haskell code, with no dependencies aside from GHC's standard library. It could convert Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and…
Twenty years ago, on August 3, 2006, John MacFarlane uploaded the inaugural version of Pandoc to his website under the free GPL license. This initial release, Pandoc 0.1, was a modest 3000 lines of Haskell code with no dependencies other than GHC's standard library. Its initial capabilities were limited to converting Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX documents into a select few formats, including RTF and S5.
Looking back, it's hard to comprehend the journey that has unfolded over the past two decades. Pandoc has blossomed into the most popular Haskell program, undergoing over two hundred releases and evolving into a tool that supports an impressive 50+ document formats. It has become an indispensable asset for automatic generation of citations and bibliographies, and has been integrated into academic writing tools such as Quarto and Jupyter Notebook. Its reach has extended globally, installed on millions of computers worldwide.
Reflecting on this, MacFarlane expresses his gratitude for the project's journey and aims to share the story of Pandoc to commemorate its birthday.
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- Twenty Years of Pandoc pandoc.org
