[ravi-delia]

I'm in college, and my profs send a lot of .docx files. In general I prefer not to start up libreoffice, so I just use a script and mailcap file to view it automatically with pandoc and zathura. I also use it to write for both assignments and personal stuff, though for anything long or with weird formatting I prefer Latex.

[dangerbird2]

Pandoc works great as a high-level wrapper around latex, where you can write the content in highly-readable markdown, while adding embedded latex for more complex stuff. Being able to use BibTex instead of MSWord's god-awful reference system for footnotes was an eye-opener, as was the ability to keep your manuscripts in text-based .md and .tex formats instead of docx, so you can track your revisions with git.

[mangamadaiyan]

I've been using pandoc for a while now, but did not know that it could handle docx (I should probably read through the manual again!).

Does it handle embedded pictures well?

[ravi-delia]

It handles them pretty ok when converting to pdf, obviously not converting them to markdown.

[mangamadaiyan]

Thank you! This has been useful to know, and I now have some amount of fiddling around with pandoc and docx files on my TODO list :)

[ravi-delia]

If you do I highly recommend looking into using a reference doc. I struggled to make the markdown -> docx conversion until I set a few reference docs up to keep consistent style.