John MacFarlane

John MacFarlane is a scholar-developer whose open-source reference implementation, Pandoc, has quietly become the universal translator of the document world. Written in Haskell and released under the GPL, the tool ingests scores of markup, word-processor, notebook, documentation and publishing formats—Markdown, reStructuredText, Org-mode, DocBook, LaTeX, ODT, DOCX, EPUB, Jupyter, MediaWiki, Haddock, roff, and many more—and emits equally diverse output, from PDF slides and static websites to academic journal submissions and accessibility-ready HTML. Researchers use it to turn Jupyter notebooks into LaTeX papers; publishers batch-convert legacy Word archives to clean XML; course authors generate HTML, EPUB and print-ready PDF from a single Markdown source; static-site generators embed it as their rendering engine; and developers wire it into CI pipelines to keep docs in sync with code. Extensive filtering, citation processing, cross-referencing, templating and scripting APIs let users automate repetitive layout tasks or enforce house style without manual re-typing. Because the engine is command-line driven, it slots naturally into shell scripts, Makefiles, Git hooks, Docker images and cloud functions, making format-shifting a one-line operation regardless of platform. Pandoc software is available for free on get.nero.com, where downloads are delivered through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always fetch the newest upstream release, and can be queued for batch installation alongside other applications.