[tikhonj]

I worked on a 500+ page book[1] in Pandoc that included a bunch of code samples, math, a table of contents with working links and an index. (In hindsight, I wish we had thought about the index from the beginning rather than adding it after the fact.)

What worked well for me: Pandoc with a custom LaTeX template, and a decent amount of inline LaTeX to handle edge cases. We had a LaTeX theme to use from our publisher, but we also needed our own totally separate theme for the free version version of the book.

For one-off things like really long code lines, I found it best to manually figure out how to handle them. Sometimes there was a bit of TeX magic but, more often, I just rewrote or reorganized the code. I see the presentation and structure of code and math snippets as an integral part of how I'm communicating the underlying ideas, so manually changing things around to read better was fundamentally no different from going back and editing prose.

Unfortunately, this also means that the process was relatively hands-on. If you need something ≈completed automated, I expect Pandoc → LaTeX is going to fall a bit short. Edge cases need manual intervention, and it's easy for formatting errors to sneak in—the free version of our book has some formatting mistakes like code bleeding into the margin because I ran out of energy to fix all of them!

[1]: https://github.com/TikhonJelvis/RL-book