Tables are very complicated in LaTeX... but for a goodreason: tables are just hard. In your example:
- Should the table appear flushed to the left? Centered in the page? flushed to the right? Full-width or only content-width?
- What happens when Column 1 is long? Should the text wrap inside its own cell, overflow, or what?
- Which row/column lines should appear? None? All of them? Only those that separate headers?
These matters will only get more complicated once the table starts growing.
Of course, you could say that all these issues are presentational, and hence it's your theme's job to handle, not yours. That is fine until it breaks and you need to fix it though...
Code blocks are very easy in latex too. Install the "minted" [1] package and you can just:
About extensions, it depends I suppose. In your case I would use some rendering app like graphviz and just \includegraphics the resulting ps/pdf. All this can be easily scripted (if you are able to create an extension you should have no problem writing a script that rebuilds your ps/pdf files before building the latex file).
I do think that writing simple files in markdown feels better than doing it LaTeX. Unfortunately, as the document starts getting more complicated it's always been easier for me to just turn to "pure" LaTeX than to try and deal with it through pandoc extensions.
I think the author mentioned this elseware, but he wasn't suggesting to use .md for complicated documents, just for notes and simpler documents where you don't need the extra options like complex table formatting, you just want something quick that works.
- Should the table appear flushed to the left? Centered in the page? flushed to the right? Full-width or only content-width?
- What happens when Column 1 is long? Should the text wrap inside its own cell, overflow, or what?
- Which row/column lines should appear? None? All of them? Only those that separate headers?
These matters will only get more complicated once the table starts growing.
Of course, you could say that all these issues are presentational, and hence it's your theme's job to handle, not yours. That is fine until it breaks and you need to fix it though...
Code blocks are very easy in latex too. Install the "minted" [1] package and you can just:
About extensions, it depends I suppose. In your case I would use some rendering app like graphviz and just \includegraphics the resulting ps/pdf. All this can be easily scripted (if you are able to create an extension you should have no problem writing a script that rebuilds your ps/pdf files before building the latex file).I do think that writing simple files in markdown feels better than doing it LaTeX. Unfortunately, as the document starts getting more complicated it's always been easier for me to just turn to "pure" LaTeX than to try and deal with it through pandoc extensions.
[1] https://github.com/gpoore/minted