Markdown (2 blogmarks)

A clean pandoc LaTeX template to convert your markdown files to PDF or LaTeX. It is designed for lecture notes and exercises with a focus on computer science.

I've only ever generated super-bland PDFs from markdown using Pandoc. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that you can get such visually nice results starting from a markdown document (with some frontmatter).

I learned about this from Hans Schnedlitz's post of running Pandoc from Docker.

I learned about this one from Taylor Bell. It's a browser (Chrome) extension that can grab the main content for a page as markdown which you can then download. The reason this is useful is because you can drag and drop a file like this into a tool like Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, etc.

Let's say you are writing some code that uses a specific, niche library. Instead of relying on the LLM to know the ins and outs of the library and knowing about aspects of the latest version of that library, you can grab a markdown version of their latest docs and pass that in as context.

Based on the documentation and code examples in the given file, can you rework the previous script to make sure it is using the latest features and best practices of this library?

Or a similar thing I did recently was: after reading a blog post on a new-ish PostgreSQL feature, I grabbed the markdown for the blog post, and asked Claude for some examples of using the feature described in the blog post, but tailored to a situation I went on to describe.

When we can provide highly-specific, up-to-date context like this to an LLM, we are going to get much better results than if we toss up a one-sentence request.

I installed the extension directly from the Chrome Web Store, but I primarily linked to the GitHub project because that gives you the option to tweak and manually install the extension if that's preferred.