# Pandoc

142 Hacker News commenters recommended Pandoc and 28 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (6 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** The go-to tool for converting documents between nearly any formats, extensible with filters and templates; critics cite a huge binary, slow speed, and fiddly setup.

## Why people recommend it

- Converts between almost any format (7 comments): "I have never had any issues with it, and it's the tool I reach for anytime I need to covert documents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164180)) "knowing `pandoc` means you can convert any kind of document into any other kind of document" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50183422)) "The Swiss army knife for document conversion, Pandoc, supports compiling to WASM since 3.9" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062829))
- Markdown to Word, PDF, Typst (7 comments): "it was always there as a good option. I mostly use it for Markdown->Typst these days and it does this job very well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49165293)) "Pandoc is great for resumes too. My static website turns my pandoc resume into pdf and html and they look great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46029919)) "Something I've started doing in my workflow is using Pandoc to convert between Markdown and DOCX" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46320310))
- Extensible via Lua filters, templates (4 comments): "for what it offers (templating, lua filters, built-in templates for all supported markup languages) it is entirely reasonable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056573)) "anything the tool doesn't do that you want is probably implementable with a simple inline filter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927851)) "makes it really easy to have one source document that does different things when outputting to different formats" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49350781))
- Fits into daily scripted workflows (5 comments): "my workflow is already full of little pandoc scripts that do document conversion wherever I need it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46929822)) "Pandoc is awesome. My fav usage is configuring git to use it to normalize binary docs to markdown" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164231)) "I use it multiple times per day to move content between Outlook emails and a coding harness" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162439))

## What people warn about

- Huge binary, heavy dependencies (4 comments): "pandoc is big (nearly 200MB binary on Debian) and does far more than just Markdown -> HTML" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46764463)) "it has a huge binary and (just tested) is nearly thirty times slower than comrak!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898225)) "I won't touch Pandoc with a ten foot pole because of the endless Haskell dependencies on Arch Linux." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162613))
- Slow rendering (2 comments): "My biggest was time — my Makefile process was taking several (like 10+) seconds to render everything" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48308244)) "it has a huge binary and (just tested) is nearly thirty times slower than comrak!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898225))
- Setup and templates are overhead (5 comments): "Pandoc is powerful but the CLI and template management can be a massive overhead for simple tasks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013242)) "still requires a non-zero amount of time to setup and most importantly maintain and keep up to date" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736641)) "I couldn't figure out even the most basic things, mostly because of the dozens of incompatible flavors" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546508))
- Lossy conversions, especially inbound (4 comments): "pandoc has an internal representation of what a document is. That representation is not as rich as many of the formats it supports." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45801875)) "kept having issues with loss of information and sometimes even syntax error" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708861)) "Works great on my MD -> DOCX/PDF/HTML workflows but not the inverse, alas." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48295479))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Asciidoctor](https://hackerapproved.com/p/asciidoctor.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Pandoc", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pandoc/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).