From f78b5a4a5a885f45a0934e436647af5d8a52c1fc Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: John MacFarlane Date: Sat, 8 Aug 2015 15:18:31 -0700 Subject: Clarified what is "out of scope" in README and CONTRIBUTING.md. --- CONTRIBUTING.md | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 26 insertions(+) (limited to 'CONTRIBUTING.md') diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md index 7b321f868..75f412df0 100644 --- a/CONTRIBUTING.md +++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md @@ -25,6 +25,32 @@ including A small test case (just a few lines) is ideal. If your input is large, try to whittle it down to the minimum necessary to illustrate the problem. +Out of scope? +------------- + +A less than perfect conversion does not necessarily mean there's +a bug in pandoc. Quoting from the README: + +> Because Pandoc's intermediate representation of a document is less +> expressive than many of the formats it converts between, one should +> not expect perfect conversions between every format and every other. +> Pandoc attempts to preserve the structural elements of a document, but +> not formatting details such as margin size. And some document elements, +> such as complex tables, may not fit into Pandoc's simple document +> model. While conversions from Pandoc's Markdown to all formats aspire +> to be perfect, conversions from formats more expressive than Pandoc's +> Markdown can be expected to be lossy. + +For example, both docx and odt can represent margin size, but because +pandoc's internal document model does not contain a representation of +margin size, this information will be lost on converting from docx +to odt. (You can, however, customize margin size using `--reference-odt`.) + +So before submitting a bug report, consider whether it might be +"out of scope." If it concerns a feature of documents that isn't +representable in pandoc's Markdown, then it very likely is. +(If in doubt, you can always ask on pandoc-discuss.) + Fixing bugs from the issue tracker ---------------------------------- -- cgit v1.2.3