Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library.

Pandoc can read Markdown, CommonMark, PHP Markdown Extra, GitHub-Flavored Markdown, MultiMarkdown, and (subsets of) Textile, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, TWiki markup, TikiWiki markup, Creole 1.0, Haddock markup, OPML, Emacs Org mode, DocBook, JATS, Muse, txt2tags, Vimwiki, EPUB, ODT, and Word docx.

Pandoc can write plain text, Markdown, CommonMark, PHP Markdown Extra, GitHub-Flavored Markdown, MultiMarkdown, reStructuredText, XHTML, HTML5, LaTeX (including beamer slide shows), ConTeXt, RTF, OPML, DocBook, JATS, OpenDocument, ODT, Word docx, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, DokuWiki markup, ZimWiki markup, Haddock markup, EPUB (v2 or v3), FictionBook2, Textile, groff man, groff ms, Emacs Org mode, AsciiDoc, InDesign ICML, TEI Simple, Muse, PowerPoint slide shows and Slidy, Slideous, DZSlides, reveal.js or S5 HTML slide shows. It can also produce PDF output on systems where LaTeX, ConTeXt, pdfroff, wkhtmltopdf, prince, or weasyprint is installed.

Pandoc’s enhanced version of Markdown includes syntax for tables, definition lists, metadata blocks, Div blocks, footnotes and citations, embedded LaTeX (including math), Markdown inside HTML block elements, and much more. These enhancements, described further under Pandoc’s Markdown, can be disabled using the markdown_strict format.

Pandoc has a modular design: it consists of a set of readers, which parse text in a given format and produce a native representation of the document (like an abstract syntax tree or AST), and a set of writers, which convert this native representation into a target format. Thus, adding an input or output format requires only adding a reader or writer. Users can also run custom pandoc filters to modify the intermediate AST.

Because pandoc’s intermediate representation of a document is less expressive than many of the formats it converts between, 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 such as margin size. And some document elements, such as complex tables, may not fit into pandoc’s simple document model. While conversions from pandoc’s Markdown to all formats aspire to be perfect, conversions from formats more expressive than pandoc’s Markdown can be expected to be lossy.