Pandoc dubs itself a "markup format" converter. It can take a document in one of the supported formats and convert only its markup to another format. Maintaining the look and feel of the document is not a priority.[5]
Plug-ins for custom formats can also be written in Lua, which has been used to create an exporting tool for the Journal Article Tag Suite, for example.[6]
CiteProc
An included CiteProc option allows pandoc to use bibliographic data from reference management software in any of five formats: BibTeX, BibLaTeX, CSL JSON or CSL YAML, or RIS.[7] The information is automatically transformed into a citation in various styles (such as APA, Chicago, or MLA) using an implementation of the Citation Style Language.[7] This allows the program to serve as a simpler alternative to LaTeX for producing academic writing in Markdown with inline citation keys.[8] Or the program can be used to convert any bibliographic data stream in the accepted formats into a list of citations in a chosen style.[9]
Supported file formats
Input formats
The input format with the most support is an extended version of Markdown.[10] Notwithstanding, pandoc can also read in the following formats:
^"John MacFarlane". Department of Philosophy. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 25 July 2014.
^"Pandoc User's Guide". pandoc.org. Description. Retrieved 22 January 2019. ...one should not expect perfect conversions between every format and every other. Pandoc attempts to preserve the structural elements of a document, but not formatting details...
^See as an example MacFarlane, John (17 May 2014). "Pandoc for Haskell Hackers". BayHac 2014, Mountain View, CA. Retrieved 27 June 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: location (link) The source file is written in Markdown.