Is it possible to sync between markdown and pdf, or between markdown and 
docx nowadays ? Many thanks !

On Saturday, May 14, 2016 at 11:50:25 PM UTC+8 BH wrote:

> On Tuesday, May 3, 2016 at 2:39:05 PM UTC-4, John MacFarlane wrote:
>>
>> Pandoc doesn't store any source-mapping information in 
>> the AST. 
>>
>
> This is, of course, right, but two-way sync (in both directions) is 
> possible nonetheless (albeit in a way that's quite fragile). Here's the 
> rough idea (both requiring that pdfsync be used when compiling the .pdf 
> file):
>
> 1. For backward search (from .pdf to .md): have the .pdf viewer send the 
> source (.tex) file and line number to a script that (a) reads in the 
> relevant line from the .tex file, (b) extracts a reasonable-sized chunk of 
> text, (c) searches for that text in the corresponding markdown file, and 
> finally (d) sends the line number of that text to the text editor.
>
> 2. For forward search (from .md to .pdf) do the opposite: have the text 
> editor send the source (.md) file and line number to a script that (a) 
> reads in the relevant line from the .md file, (b) extracts a 
> reasonable-sized chunk of text, (c) searches for that text in the 
> corresponding .tex file, and finally (d) sends the line number of that text 
> to the .pdf viewer.
>
> Clearly, a problem lies in step (b) in both cases: how do you locate the 
> relevant text to use in searching the corresponding file for? What I've 
> done differs between (1) and (2).
>
> In (2), I find it easiest to take the whole line of markdown, strip off 
> any initial markdown codes (such as those for enumerated lists), run it 
> through pandoc (using exactly the same options I use to generate the .pdf 
> in the first place) to convert to LaTeX, and then search for this in the 
> .tex file.
>
> In (1), I find I need to use a different strategy, since .tex -> .md 
> conversion in pandoc often fails to produce a match in the .md file. (This 
> is partly because of the way I have extended markdown using some filters.) 
> So here I try to locate a stretch of text in the .tex file that does not 
> contain any LaTeX commands as follows: I try searching for the first 
> occurrence of '\' in the relevant line, and if this occurs deep enough into 
> the text, I grab text from the beginning of the line to that point. If not, 
> I look for a stretch of text after that '\' that occurs between '{' and 
> '}'. Usually this is good enough to find a unique match in the markdown 
> file.
>
> As I said, this is fragile: it won't work in every case, but for me it 
> works about 90-95% of the time, which is good enough for my purposes.
>

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