Plugin idea: multi-format export using pandoc with custom parameters

Hello everyone,

I'm a huge fan and promoter of Joplin. I'm an academic by trade, and have already convinced many friends and colleagues to switch to it. I can't thank Laurent enough for his fantastic work, and am amazed by what this community has already achieved with plugins.

As an academic, I love the Bibtex plugin for citations. However, it is still not possible for me to write my articles entirely in Joplin -- although we're almost there.

I used to write academic articles in LaTeX, but a while ago I switched to markdown + a makefile with pandoc parameters to easily export to pdf, word, epub, or html with the font of my choice (preserving markdown structure and Bibtex citations).

The approach I use is explained in detail in this blog post. It is very simple, and I think it would not be too difficult to integrate it directly in Joplin as a plugin, although I sadly lack the technical skills.

Here is how I envision this:

  • The markdown preamble could be made into a template using the template plugin.
  • The makefile could be easily customized (for pdf, word, epub, html export) in the plugin settings; for example, letting users pick a font.
  • The plugin would need pandoc and make as dependencies, doing all the actual heavy lifting.

This plugin would essentially allow users to write professionally typeset documents from start to finish in Joplin, completely removing the need for word processors or LaTeX. This would be a fantastic addition for academics and students, but also for anyone else who writes long documents that need to look more professional that the default pdf export, and/or need to be exported in other formats (doc, otf, epub, tex, html...). For me, as I'm sure for many others, it would completely change my writing workflow and let me spend all my time in Joplin.

Any suggestions to make this a reality would be most welcome!

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Would be great. Waiting for that you can use Zettlr as your external editor.

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