I like the editor Atom¹. Although it’s a huge beast, paired withe the plugin markdown-preview-enhanced² for previewing Markdown on-the-fly, PlantUML³ for rendering various styles of UML diagrams and finally Pandoc⁴, for converting Markdown to PDFs, Latex or even Word documents.

When I learned that Microsoft will discontinue Atom⁵ in favor of VSCode⁶, I was a tad pisched (though I did the change because the whole toolchain there works the same, so I swallowed the toad).

However, sometimes VSCode or Atom are just way to bloated, and usually I’m just using vi To Get Shit Done™. What I missed was inline rendering of PlantUML diagrams before feeding it to Pandoc.

After some investigation I found pandoc-plantuml-filter⁷ which is just doing was I was looking for. After installing with pip and simply adding the --filter plantuml-filter it worked as expected without any further complications. The result is exactly as if rendered by Atom or VSCode.

Well, no real-time preview in vi, but whatever.

Update Mon 20 Jun 2022 12:28:40 PM CEST: I added an example.

References

Github, “A hackable text editor for the 21st Century,” Atom. https://atom.io/ (accessed Jun. 18, 2022). ↩
shd101wyy, “markdown-preview-enhanced,” Atom. https://atom.io/packages/markdown-preview-enhanced (accessed Jun. 18, 2022). ↩
Ezoic Inc., “Open-source tool that uses simple textual descriptions to draw beautiful UML diagrams.,” PlantUML.com. https://plantuml.com/ (accessed Jun. 18, 2022). ↩
MacFarlane, John, “Pandoc - About pandoc.” https://pandoc.org/ (accessed Jun. 18, 2022). ↩
Abhishek, “To Favor Microsoft VS Code, Microsoft’s GitHub is Killing GitHub’s Atom Editor,” It’s FOSS News, Jun. 10, 2022. https://news.itsfoss.com/atom-being-discontinued/ (accessed Jun. 18, 2022). ↩
Microsoft, “Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined.” https://code.visualstudio.com/ (accessed Jun. 18, 2022). ↩
T. Furrer, pandoc-plantuml-filter. 2022. Accessed: Jun. 18, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/timofurrer/pandoc-plantuml-filter ↩