About a year and a half ago, I wrote a series of pandoc filters designed to facilitate writing chemistry in pandoc. Specifically, I was looking to solve a few problems:

• Not surprisingly, there is no native support for alternate figure types (schemes, charts, etc.) in pandoc.
• Pandoc takes advantage of LaTeX’s native captioning. This has the side effect of adding labels (“Figure X”) to captions in LaTeX/pdf output, but not in other formats (e.g., html, Word). I always found this mildly irritating since the same markdown is rendered differently in different formats.
• Pandoc doesn’t have native cross-referencing support (although I suspect that will change down the road).
• Pandoc doesn’t natively support the “wordwrap” LaTeX package, so text does not flow around figures in LaTeX/pdf output. In principle, I don’t have a problem with this, but if you’re writing with a hard page limit it’s a huge problem.

The cross-referencing issue is a big one, and not surprisingly there are excellent filters already available that provide this functionality (e.g., pandoc-fignos, pandoc-numbering). However, for the specific combination of problems faced by a chemist trying to write reasonable looking chemistry, I didn’t find solutions that exactly met my needs.

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In general, I like to write my pandoc documents as close to the canonical format as possible and let LaTeX deal with positioning figures. It works pretty well, and it’s infinitely more straightforward than doing it in Word. However, LaTeX doesn’t natively wrap text around figures, and sometimes you really need to maximize the use of space. In pure LaTeX, this can be done with the wrapfig package. In pandoc, this package can be used through a template, but it’s a little tricky if you don’t want every figure treated the same way.

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