I use pandoc—and its flavor of markdown—to create my webpages, slides, PDFs, and Word files. Ironically, the only place I don’t use it is here, on a markdown-based blog, where I have been stuck with Pelican’s more limited markdown parser.

Fortunately, the pandoc-reader plugin is now good enough. This entails a speed hit, but I can turn on pelican’s cache—new to me—and in sum it’s faster than before with more functionality!

I can include footnotes^[Your foot is noted.], citations [Giddens (1979)], and tables:

Right Left Center Default

 12     12        12            12
123     123       123          123
  1     1          1             1

Table: Demonstration of simple table syntax.

Awesome!

The one hitch is that you have to convert your markdown files with pelican metadata to pandoc YAML metadata. I wrote pel2pan.py for this.

References