pandoc & PDF

Oy.

There's a good reason why I hate LaTeX, and that's bloat.  Here's an example:

rst2pdf (restructured text to PDF) converts marked-up text to PDF.  The package, and it's dependencies, take maybe a couple of tens of megs at the most.

pandoc depends on LaTeX to produce PDF files.  The minimum packages needed to produce PDF with LaTeX (using markdown2pdf) consumes nearly a gigabyte of disk space.  I mean, seriously; that's absurd. I'm no LaTeX newbie; it's always been a bloated hog, but it's getting much worse.  And you know what?  It doesn't do anything more than the alternatives.  Lout, for example, at a fraction of the disk space will do math just as well, thank you, and produce just as pretty output with just as much control over formatting -- although, Lout appears to be defunct.  Oh, well.

Anyway, I'm just frustrated with bloat lately, and although I really want to use pandoc (docutils is nice, but pandoc has a broader range of formatting options, such as markup for strike-out, subscript, and superscript, and better table formatting control), I'm loath to install a gig of crap just to get it. oc has a broader range of formatting options, such as markup for strike-out, subscript, and superscript, and better table formatting control), I'm loath to install a gig of crap just to get it.