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

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

[John Gabriele]

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

[John MacFarlane]

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
>
> -- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pandoc-discuss" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pandoc-discuss+unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org
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Re: how to use a tabular in my markdown (any special considerations?)

[John Gabriele]

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
>>
>> -- 
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pandoc-discuss" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pandoc-discuss+unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org
>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pandoc-discuss/2c8ee7b9-3c91-452f-8e31-5c6c40c46d3d%40www.fastmail.com.

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