One of the bragging points of digital information is that it’s supposed to be possible to convert it from one format to another. Actually doing the conversion is often where theory runs headlong into practice and gets a concussion. Thankfully, when I need to convert text documents from one format into another, whether for myself or as part of an application, I’ve been able to hand the job to Pandoc.
When people ask me “What is Pandoc?”, I reply with a Star Trek-y summary: “It’s the Universal Translator for text document formats.” Need to take a LaTeX file and turn it into a PDF or Epub ebook? No prob. Got documents on a topic from different sources in different formats and need them all converted to HTML? Easy-peasy. Are you writing an application that takes documents in multiple formats as input and needs to extract the information from them? Have your application call Pandoc to convert those docs into a format it can read.
Want a sense of the formats that Pandoc can translate from and to? Check out the graph below, which shows but a fraction of its translation repertoire, and click on it to see the whole thing:
Like many of the best tools in my “belt,” Pandoc is open source, and it’s also been around for a while. In fact, today (August 3, 2026) is its 20th anniversary!
Developer John MacFarlane wrote it in Haskell (in fact, it’s the most popular program written in Haskell) and first published it on his website under the GPL 20 years ago. I’ve used it regularly for all kinds of projects, including an integration into documentation management system that’s still in use at a very pricey cruise ship company.
To celebrate this milestone anniversary, MacFarlane wrote up an article, Twenty Years of Pandoc, which is worth checking out. However, the best way to really celebrate this anniversary is to take Pandoc for a spin if you’ve never use it before.
Happy 20th, Pandoc, and thanks for all the help!