Re: how to use a tabular in my markdown (any special considerations?)

["John Gabriele" <jgabriele-97jfqw80gc6171pxa8y+qA@public.gmane.org>]

Ah! I'd forgotten that *in LaTeX*:

  * `^` is special --- and you can't just backslash-escape it to get that character (since that would give you a hat)
  * `<` and `>` are also special in plain text, yielding ¡ (upside-down bang) and ¿ (upside-down question mark)  for some reason (!?).
  * you can put stuff like that into `\verb|...|` so they come out verbatim.

So, `\verb` worked fine for me.

Thank you! And thanks for the tip about debugging by looking at Pandoc's latex output.
-- John



On Sat, Jun 25, 2022, at 4:10 PM, John MacFarlane wrote:
> You can debug some problems like this by using
> pandoc -t latex
>
> For example
>
> pandoc -t latex
> ^\<Up/Down/Left/Right\>
>
> yields
>
> \^{}\textless Up/Down/Left/Right\textgreater{}
>
> which tells you that ^ and < and > need to
> be treated specially in LaTeX.
>
>
>
> "John Gabriele" <jgabriele-97jfqw80gc6171pxa8y+qA@public.gmane.org> writes:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm trying to put a tabular element in my markdown file. My LaTeX is a little rusty, but here's what I have
>>
>> ~~~
>> hi
>>
>> \begin{tabular}{l l}
>> ^<Up/Down/Left/Right> &  move by word/para \\
>> <PgUp/PgDn/Home/End>  &  what you expect \\
>> [a/e                  &  beginning/end of doc \\
>> ^]                    &  go to matching bracket \\
>> ^j                    &  jump to line number \\
>> \end{tabular}
>>
>> bye
>> ~~~
>>
>> This fails with:
>>
>> ~~~
>> Error producing PDF.
>> ! Missing $ inserted.
>> <inserted text> 
>>                 $
>> l.70 ^
>> ~~~
>>
>> I thought maybe it was those carets (^), so I backslash-escaped them, but then still got this error:
>>
>> ~~~
>> Error producing PDF.
>> ! Missing number, treated as zero.
>> <to be read again> 
>>                    a
>> l.73 \^]
>> ~~~
>>
>> What special text rules must I follow in the content of my tabular fields?
>>
>> ***
>>
>> Background: BTW, the reason I want to do this is because I'm writing a twocolumn landscape pdf, and it turns out that tables don't work in 2-column (see https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/1023 ). I thought maybe it would work because my output pdf is landscape rather than portrait:
>>
>>     pandoc -t pdf -o foo.pdf -V geometry="margin=0.8in,landscape,twocolumn" -V fontsize=12pt foo.txt
>>
>> but alas that is not the case. So, I figured I'd get my tables by writing raw latex tabular blocks.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -- John
>>
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