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# Use `pandoc` as markdown processor
The trigger but not the actual reason for this replacement of `kramdown` with `pandoc` was a strange generation issue with `kramdown`'s latest release.
All recent articles failed to generate anything more than an empty page. A quick check of the resulting HTML for those articles offered nothing out of the ordinary. After taking a close look at the articles in question I narrowed the set of failing articles down to those containing footnotes - tangentially I only started using footnotes a couple of articles ago i.e. this explained this part of the issue.
Some debugging of `InputXSLT` offered the following problem: `Xerces-C` generated an error message and stopped processing XML inputs containing `nbsp` non-blocking space characters in the implementation of the `external-command` function. This change in `kramdown`'s output can be traced back to enhancement issue [399](https://github.com/gettalong/kramdown/pull/399). Obviously this is not a problem in `kramdown` but an issue in the way this static site generator is wrapping HTML inputs.
This problem should be solvable by adding appropriate namespace and doctype declarations to the markdown-generated HTML output. Instead I opted to perform the change to `pandoc` I had already planned for quite some time.
The choice fell on `pandoc` as it offers some additional markdown features as well as allowing for conversion to a rich set of document formats. i.e. features like printing articles as PDF using LaTeX are trivial to implement if `pandoc` is the markdown processor of choice. Furthermore page compilation is noticeably faster using `pandoc`.
One might note that this switch only solved the original issue by coincidence: Should `pandoc` start to generate non-blocking space characters the same problem will occur. But I have hopes that such a change would be configurable via `pandoc`'s plethora of configuration options. As this static site generator assumes everything to be XHTML I see no reason why I should not continue to treat HTML inputs as XML.
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