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DerEuroMark0 Hot0 comments4 min read
Pandoc: What survives a conversion? – DerEuroMark
An analysis of how well pandoc round-trips document features across the formats it supports, using a methodology of paired probe documents (one using a feature, one without) rather than diffing against the original input. Testing 66 features across formats like markdown, HTML, LaTeX, docx, epub, and pptx shows that most formats can express far more than they can recover on read-back: HTML expresses 63/66 but only returns 42, CommonMark drops 35, LaTeX and docx each drop 30, and pptx expresses 40 features but recovers zero on round trip. A new markup language called Carve, built by the author, expresses 64 and returns all 64, matching pandoc's native AST format in round-trip fidelity. The testing harness and probes are published for others to reproduce.
Source: https://www.dereuromark.de/2026/08/19/pandoc-what-survives-a-conversion. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
