5. Getting pandoc to make a Word document with hi-res images

I use pandoc for nearly everything I write.¹ It’s a nifty command line tool for converting documents into any format.

The way I use pandoc is that I write using markdown — a markup syntax that is simple and elegant. Then I use pandoc to convert the finished product to the format I need.

For example, when I blog over at Economics from the Top Down, I write my posts in markdown. Then I use pandoc to generate HTML files, which I dump into WordPress. This way I never have to touch the much maligned WordPress editor.

When I write a long post, I’ve started hosting a PDF and EPUB version of the document. (Example here.) How do I do that? You guessed it — with pandoc.²

It’s hard for me to express how much simpler pandoc has made my life as a scientific writer. When I first made the jump to writing in plain text, I used LaTeX. That was great for my workflow as an academic, which involved making PDFs. But it came with one huge problem: when someone asked for a Word document, I was left kicking and screaming.

Pandoc changed that. To convert my markdown document to docx, it’s as simple as:

pandoc article.md -o article.docx

The docx output is generally fantastic, with one exception. By default, pandoc likes to compress images when it puts them in a docx file. I learned that the hard way when I sent a manuscript for publishing, only to realize later that the figure resolution was crap.

Fortunately, this low resolution is easy to fix. Just run pandoc with the dpi (dots per inch) flag. I usually generate my figures at 600 dpi. So I pass that along to pandoc:

pandoc --dpi=600 article.md -o article.docx

Presto, you get a word document with stellar images.