Most of us have been there in the early days of word processing and are nonetheless keen on our first word processors. Oh certain, there were mini-computers like the Xerox Alto, but within the early days of the PC world we used character-based interfaces and we favored it. Steve Jobs would, in fact, look in on the Alto and see the mouse-based, bit-mapped graphics future that lead to the Macintosh. But, at the time we had been just pleased to have any kind of word processing.
With Pandoc, you have a swiss-army knife of a converter, able to convert practically any markup format into some other. Pandoc contains a Haskell library for conversions as properly as a command-line software that uses this library. It can convert to and from just about anything– lightweight markup formats, HTML codecs, documentation codecs, ebooks, TeX codecs, word processor formats…
