// the find
mb21/panwriter
Markdown editor with pandoc integration and paginated preview.
PanWriter is a distraction-free Markdown editor built on Electron that wraps pandoc for format conversion and uses pagedjs to render a paginated preview — so you can see page breaks as you write. It's aimed at people writing documents (papers, reports, books) in Markdown who need to produce polished PDFs or Word files without touching LaTeX or a separate build step.
Paginated preview via pagedjs is the real differentiator — most Markdown editors show a scrolling web view, not actual pages with margins and breaks. Pandoc integration is proper: import and export both go through pandoc, so you get the full format coverage (EPUB, docx, LaTeX, HTML, etc.) rather than a hand-rolled exporter. YAML front-matter drives per-document layout and pandoc options, which is the right model for this kind of tool. The codebase is small and readable — clear separation between the Electron layer and the React/CodeMirror UI.
Hard dependency on a locally installed pandoc binary is a real friction point for new users, especially on macOS where Gatekeeper also blocks the unsigned app bundle. Development appears to have slowed significantly — 62 forks and 1.2k stars over several years suggests a small, stable niche rather than active growth, and the TODO.md probably has more items than recent commits. The preview is rendered inside an iframe via pagedjs, which means CSS custom to your document has to be threaded through carefully and debugging layout issues is opaque. No collaborative or cloud features at all, which is fine by design, but means this is purely a local single-user tool with no sync story.