pandoc

pandoc is currently an experimental R package primarily develop to help maintainers of R Markdown ecosystem.

Indeed, the R Markdown ecosystem is highly dependent on Pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) changes and it is designed to be as version independent as possible. R Markdown is best used with the latest Pandoc version but any rmarkdown package version should work with previous version of Pandoc, and new change in Pandoc should not break any rmarkdown features.

This explains the needs for a more focused tooling to:

• Install and manage several Pandoc versions. This is useful for testing versions and comparing between them.
• Call Pandoc’s command directly without the layers added by rmarkdown. This is useful for debugging or quickly iterating and finding where a bug comes from.
• Retrieve information from Pandoc directly. Each version comes with changes and some of them are included into the binary. Being able to retrieve those information and compare between versions is important to help maintain the user exposed tooling.

This package can also be useful to advanced developers that are working around Pandoc through rmarkdown or not.

Installation

Install from CRAN:

install.packages("pandoc")

The development version can be install from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("cderv/pandoc")

Usage

All functions are prefixed with pandoc_ and you will find below their main usage. See Get started for usage examples and Reference page for full details of functions.

Most functions follows these following rules:

• They are prefixed with pandoc_ .
• They can be used with any installed Pandoc version using version argument.
• Versions to use are passed as a string, either the version number (e.g "2.14.2" ), or one special alias (default, nightly , rstudio , system) .

Available functions allows:

• Installing / Uninstalling specific Pandoc version from ‘2.0.3’ to ‘3.1.6.2’ , including development version of Pandoc.
  • pandoc_install(), pandoc_install_nightly(), pandoc_uninstall(), …
• Switching Pandoc version by activating a specific one or running any function with a specific Pandoc version using version= argument.
  • pandoc_activate() , with_pandoc() , ….
• Managing locally installed version of Pandoc as versions installed by this package are located within one folder per version in a user’s data directory.
  • pandoc_installed_versions() , pandoc_installed_latest , pandoc::pandoc_is_installed() , pandoc_locate(), pandoc_available(), …
• Using easily one of the installed version with rmarkdown (i.e rmarkdown::render() will use the version activated by this pandoc)
  • See pandoc::pandoc_activate(rmarkdown = TRUE)
• Running a Pandoc binary from R, including a version installed system-wise (pandoc_bin("system")), or the version shipped with RStudio (pandoc_bin("rstudio")).
• Calling binary at low-level from R with any version installed.
  • pandoc_run()
• to easily access information in R usually requiring command line execution
  • pandoc_version(), pandoc_list_extensions() , pandoc_export_template() , and all other wrappers…
• opening Pandoc’s resources from R
  • pandoc::pandoc_browse_manual(), pandoc::pandoc_browse_extension() , ….

Example

library(pandoc)
# Install version
pandoc_install("2.7.3")
#> ✔ Pandoc 2.7.3 already installed.
#>   Use 'force = TRUE' to overwrite.
pandoc_install("2.11.4")
#> ✔ Pandoc 2.11.4 already installed.
#>   Use 'force = TRUE' to overwrite.
# Highest install is used
pandoc_version()
#> [1] '3.1.6'

See detailed examples in Get started.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the pandoc project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.