Category: opensource

A review of Taguette – an open source alternative for qualitative data coding

Posted on by KathyReid

Motivation and context

As you might know, I’m currently undertaking a PhD program at Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics, looking at voice dataset documentation practices, and what we might be able to improve about them to reduce statistical and experienced bias in voice technologies like speech recognition and wake words. As part of this journey, I’ve learned an array of new research methods – surveys, interviews, ethics approaches, literature review and so on. I’m now embarking on some early qualitative data analysis.

The default tool in the qualitative data analysis space is NVIVO, made by Melbourne-based company, QSR. However, NVIVO has both a steep learning curve and a hefty price tag. I’m lucky enough that this pricing is abstracted away from me – ANU provides NVIVO for free to HDR students and staff – but reports suggest that the enterprise licensing starts at around $USD 85 per user. NVIVO operates predominantly as a desktop-based pieces of software and is only available for Mac or Windows. My preferred operating system is Linux – as that is what my academic writing toolchain based on LaTeX, Atom and Pandoc – is based on – and I wanted to see if there was a tool with equivalent functionality that aligned with this toolchain.

About Taguette

Taguette is a BSD-3 licensed qualitative coding tool, positioned as an alternative to NVIVO. It’s written by a small team of library specialists and software developers, based in New York. The developers are very clear about their motivation in creating Taguette;

Qualitative methods generate rich, detailed research materials that leave individuals’ perspectives intact as well as provide multiple contexts for understanding the phenomenon under study. Qualitative methods are used in a wide range of fields, such as anthropology, education, nursing, psychology, sociology, and marketing. Qualitative data has a similarly wide range: observations, interviews, documents, audiovisual materials, and more. However – the software options for qualitative researchers are either far too expensive, don’t allow for the seminal method of highlighting and tagging materials, or actually perform quantitative analysis, just on text. It’s not right or fair that qualitative researchers without massive research funds cannot afford the basic software to do their research. So, to bolster a fair and equitable entry into qualitative methods, we’ve made Taguette!

Taguette.org website, “About” page

This motivation spoke to me, and aligned with my own interest in free and open source software.

Running Taguette and identifying its limitations

For reproduceability, I ran Taguette version 1.1.1 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with Python 3.8.10

Taguette can be run in the cloud, and the website provides a demo server so that you can explore the cloud offering. However, I was more interested in the locally-hosted option, which runs on a combination of python, calibre, and I believe sqlite as the database backend, with SQLAlchemy for mappings. The install instructions recommend running Taguette in a virtual environment, and this worked well for me – presumably running the binary from the command line spawns a flask– or gunicorn– type web application, which you can then access in your browser. This locally hosted feature was super helpful for me, as my ethics protocol has restrictions on what cloud services I could use.

To try Taguette, I first created a project, then uploaded a Word document in docx format, and began highlighting. This was smooth and seamless. However, I soon ran into my first limitation. My coding approach is to use nested codes. Taguette has no functionality for nested codes, and no concomitant functionality for “rolling up” nested codes. This was a major blocker for me.

However, I was impressed that I could add tags in multiple languages, including non-Latin orthographies, such as Japanese and Arabic. Presumably, although I didn’t check this, Taguette uses Unicode under the hood – so it’s foreseeable that you could use emojis as tags as well, which might be useful for researchers of social media.

Taguette has no statistical analysis tools built in, such as word frequency distributions, clustering or other corpus-type methods. While these weren’t as important for me at this stage of my research, they are functions that I envisage using in the future.

Taguette’s CodeBook export and import functions work really well, and I was impressed with the range of formats that could be imported or exported.

What I would like Taguette to do in the future

I really need nested tags that have aggregation functionality for Taguette to be a a viable software tool for my qualitative data analysis – this is a high priority feature, followed by statistical analysis tools.

Some thoughts on the broader academic software ecosystem

Even though I won’t be adopting Taguette, I admire and respect the vision it has – to free qualitative researchers from being anchored to expensive, limiting tools. While I’m fortunate enough to be afforded an NVIVO license, many smaller, less wealthy or less research-intensive universities will struggle to provide a license seat for all qualitative researchers.

This is another manifestation of universities becoming increasingly beholden to large software manufacturers, rather than having in-house capabilities to produce and manage software that directly adds value to a university’s core capability of generating new knowledge. We’ve seen it in academic journals – with companies like EBSCO, Sage and Elsevier intermediating the publication of journals, hording copyrights to articles and collecting a tidy profit in the process – and we’re increasingly seeing it in academic software. Learning Management Systems such as Desire2Learn and Blackboard are now prohibitively expensive, while open source alternatives such as Moodle still require skilled (and therefore expensive) staff to be maintained and integrated – a challenge when universities are shedding staff in the post-COVID era.

Moreover, tools like NVIVO are imbricated in other structures which reinforce their dominance. University HDR training courses and resource guides are devoted to software tools which are in common use. Additionally, supervisors and senior academics are likely to use the dominant software, and so are in an influential position to recommend its use to their students. This support infrastructure reinforces their dominance by ascribing them a special, or reified status within the institution. At a broader level, even though open source has become a dominant business model, the advocacy behind free and open source software (FOSS) appears to be waning; open source is now the mainstream, and it no longer requires a rebel army of misfits, nerds and outliers (myself included) to be its flag-bearers. This begs the question – who advocates for FOSS within the academy? And more importantly – what influence do they have compared with a slick marketing and sales effort from a global multi-national? I’m reminded here of Eben Moglen’s wise words at linux.conf.au 2015 in Auckland in the context of opposing patent trolls through collective efforts – “freedom itself depends upon how we make use of the technologies we are creating”. That is, universities themselves have created the dependence on academic technologies which now restrict them.

There is hope, however. Platforms like ArXiv – the free distribution service and open access archive for nearly two million pre-prints in mathematics, computer science and other (primarily quant) fields – are starting to challenge the status quo. For example, the Australian Research Council recently overturned their prohibition on the citation of pre-prints in competitive grant applications.

Imagine if universities combined their resources – like they have done with ArXiv – to provide an open source qualitative coding tool, locally hosted, and accessible to everyone. In the words of Freire,

“Reading is not walking on the words; it’s grasping the soul of them.”

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Qualitative analysis tools allow us to grasp the soul of the artefacts we create through research; and that ability should be afforded to everyone – not just those that can afford it.

State of my toolchain 2021

Posted on by KathyReid

I’ve been doing a summary of the state of my toolchain now for around five years (2019, 2018, 2016). Tools, platforms and techniques evolve over time; the type of work that I do has shifted; and the environment in which that work is done has changed due to the global pandemic. Documenting my toolchain has been a useful exercise on a number of fronts; it’s made explicit what I actually use day-to-day, and, equally – what I don’t. In an era of subscription-based software, this has allowed me to make informed decisions about what to drop – such as Pomodone. It’s also helped me to identify niggles or gaps with my existing toolchain, and to deliberately search for better alternatives.

At a glance

Hardware, wearables and accessories

Software

Techniques

  • Pomodoro (no change since last report)
  • Passion Planner for planning (no change since last report)

What’s changed since the last report?

Writing workflow

Since the last report in 2019, I’ve graduated from a Masters in Applied Cybernetics at the School of Cybernetics at Australian National University. I was accepted into the first cohort of their PhD program. This shift has meant an increased focus on in-depth, academic-style writing. To help with this, I’ve moved to a Pandoc, Atom, Zotero and LaTeX-based workflow, which has been documented separately. This workflow is working solidly for me after about a year. Although it took about a weekend worth of setup time, it’s definitely saving me a lot of time.

Atom in particularly is my predominant IDE, and also my key writing tool. I use it with a swathe of plugins for LaTeX, document structure, and Zotero-based academic citations. It took me a while to settle on a UI and syntax theme for Atom, but in the end I went with Atom Solarized. My strong preference is to write in MarkDown, and then export to a target format such as PDF or LaTeX. Pandoc handles this beautifully, but I do have to keep a file of command line snippets handy for advanced functionality.

Primary machine

I had an ASUS Zenbook UX533FD – small, portable and great battery life, even with an MX150 GPU running. Unfortunately, the keyboard started to malfunction just after a year after purchase (I know, right). I gave up trying to get it repaired because I had to chase my local repair shop for updates on getting a replacement. I lodged a repair request in October, and it’s now May, so I’m not holding out hope… That necessitated me getting a new machine – and it was a case of getting whatever was available with the Coronavirus pandemic.

I settled on a ASUS ROG Zephyrus G15 GA502IV. I was a little cautious, having never had an AMD Ryzen-based machine before, but I haven’t looked back. It has 16 Ryzen 4900 cores, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 with 6GB of RAM. It’s a powerful workhorse and is reasonably portable, if a little noisy. It get about 3 hours’ battery life in class. Getting NVIDIA dependencies installed under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was a little tricky – especially cudnn, but that seems to be normal for anything NVIDIA under Linux. Because the hardware was so new, it lacked support in the 20.04 kernel, so I had to pull in experimental Wi-Fi drivers (it uses Realtek).

To be honest I was somewhat smug that my hardware was ahead of the kernel. One little niggle I still have is that the machine occasionally green screens. This has been reported with other ROG models and I suspect it’s an HDMI-under-Linux driver issue, but haven’t gone digging too far into driver diagnostics. Yet.

One idiosyncrasy of the Zephyrus G15 is that it doesn’t have built-in web camera; for me that was a feature. I get to choose when I do and don’t connect the web camera. And yes – I’m firmly in the web-cameras-shouldn’t-have-to-be-on by default camp.

Machine learning work, NVIDIA dependencies and utilities

Over the past 18 months, I’ve been doing a lot more work with machine learning, specifically in building the DeepSpeech PlayBook. Creating the PlayBook has meant training a lot of speech recognition models in order to document hyperparameters and tacit knowledge around DeepSpeech.

In particular, the DeepSpeech PlayBook uses a Docker image to abstract away Python, TensorFlow and other dependencies. However, this still requires all NVIDIA dependencies such as drivers and cudnn to be installed beforehand. NVIDIA has made this somewhat easier with the Linux CUDA installation guide, which advises on which version to install with other dependencies, but it’s still tough to get all the dependencies installed correctly. In particular, the nvtop utility, which is super handy for monitoring GPU operations (such as identifying blocking I/O or other bottlenecks) had to be compiled from source. As an aside, the developer experience for getting NVIDIA dependencies installed under Linux is a major hurdle for developers. It’s something I want NVIDIA to put some effort into going forward.

Colour customisation of the terminal with Gogh

I use Ubuntu Linux for 99% of my work now – and rarely boot into Windows. A lot of that work is based in the Linux terminal; from spinning up Docker containers for machine learning training, running Python scripts or even pandoc builds. At any given time I might have 5-6 open terminals, and so I needed a way to easily distinguish between them. Enter Gogh – an easy to install set of terminal profiles.

One bugbear that I still have with the Ubuntu 20.04 terminal is that the fonts that can be used with terminal profiles are restricted to only mono-spaced fonts. I haven’t been able to find where to alter this setting – or how the terminal is identifying which fonts are mono-spaced for inclusion. If you know how to alter this, let me know!

Linux variants of Microsoft software intended for Windows

ANU has adopted Microsoft primarily for communications. This means not only Outlook for mail – for which there are no good Linux alternatives (and so I use the web version), but also the use of Teams and OneNote. I managed to find an excellent alternative in OneNote for Linux by @patrikx3, which is much more usable than the web version of OneNote. Teams on Linux is usable for messaging, but for videoconferencing I’ve found that I can’t use USB or Bluetooth headphones or microphones – which essentially renders it useless. Zoom is much better on Linux.

Better microphone for videoconferencing and conference presentations

As we’ve travelled through the pandemic, we’re all using a lot more videoconferencing instead of face to face meetings, and the majority of conferences have gone online. I’ve recently presented at both PyCon AU 2020 and linux.conf.au 2021 around voice and speech recognition. Both conferences used the VenueLess platform. I decided to upgrade my microphone for better audio quality. After all, research has shown that speakers with better audio are perceived as more trustworthy. I’ve been very happy with the Stadium USB microphone.

Taskwarrior over Pomodone for tasks

I tried Pomodone for about 6 months – and it was great for integrating tasks from multiple sources such as Trello, GitHub and GitLab. However, I found it very expensive (around $AUD 80 per year) and the Linux version suddenly stopped working. The scripting options also only support Windows and Apple, not Linux. So I didn’t renew my subscription.

Instead, I’ve moved to Taskwarrior via Paul Fenwick‘s recommendation. This has some downsides – it’s a command line utility rather than a graphical interface, and it only works on a single machine. But it’s free, and it does what I need – prioritises the tasks that I need to complete.

What hasn’t changed

Wearables and hearables

My Mobvoi TicWatch Pro is still going strong, and Google appears to be giving Wear OS some love. It’s the longest I’ve had a smart watch, and given how rugged and hardy the TicWatch has been, it will definitely be my first choice when this one reaches end of life. My Plantronics BB Pro 2 are still going strong, and I got another pair on sale as my first pair are now four years old and the battery is starting to degrade.

Quantified self

I’ve started using Sleep as Android for sleep tracking, which uses data from the TicWatch. This has been super handy for assessing the quality of sleep, and making changes such as adjusting going-to-bed times. Sleep as Android exports data to Google Drive. BeeMinder ingests that data into a goal, and keeps me accountable for getting enough sleep.

RescueTime, BeeMinder and Passion Planner are still going strong, and I don’t think I’ll be moving away from them anytime soon.

Assistant services

I still refuse to use Amazon Alexa or Google Home – and they wouldn’t work with the 5GHz-band WiFi where I am living on campus. Mycroft.AI is still my go-to for a voice assistant, but I rarely use it now because the the Spotify app support for Mycroft doesn’t work anymore after Spotify blocked Mycroft from using the Spotify API.

One desktop utility that fits into the “assistant” space that I’ve found super helpful has been GNOME extensions. I use extensions for weather, peripheral selection and random desktop background selection. Being able to see easily during Australian summer how hot it is outside has been super handy.

Current gaps in my toolchain

I don’t really have any major gaps in my toolchain at the moment, but there are some things that could be better.

  • Visual Git Editor – I’ve been using command line Git for years now, but having a visual indicator of branches and merges is useful. I tried GitKraken, but I don’t use Git enough to justify the monthly-in-$USD price tag. The Git plugin for Atom is good enough for now.
  • Managing everything for me – I looked a Huginn a while back and it sounds really promising as a “second brain” – for monitoring news sites, Twitter etc – but I haven’t had time to have a good play with it yet.

Setting up an academic writing workflow using Pandoc, Markdown, Zotero and LaTeX on Ubuntu Linux using Atom

Posted on by KathyReid

This year, I started a PhD at the 3A Institute, within the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Australian National University. I came into the PhD not from a researcher or academic background, but from a career in industry as a technology practitioner. As such, my experience with formatting academic papers, for example for publication in journals, is limited. Our PhD program is hands-on; as well as identifying a specific research topic and articulating a research design, we undertake writing activities – both as academic writing practice, and to help solidify the theoretical concepts we’ve been discussing in Seminar. I needed an academic writing workflow.

For one of these writing exercises, I decided to build out a toolchain using LaTeX – the preferred typesetting tool for academic papers. This blog post documents how I approached this, and serves as a reference both for myself and others who might want to adopt a similar toolchain.

In summary, the process was:

  • Define overall goals
  • Install dependendies such as pandoc, Zotero and the BetterBibtex extension for citations, LaTeX
  • Experiment with pandoc on the command line for generating PDF from Markdown via LaTeX

Goals of an academic writing workflow

In approaching this exercise, I had several key goals:

  • create an academic writing workflow using my preferred Atom IDE on Linux;
  • that could easily be set up and replicated on other machines if needed;
  • which would allow me to use my preferred citation editor, Zotero;
  • and which would allow me to use my preferred writing format, Markdown;
  • and which would support available LaTeX templates available for journals (and from the ANU for formatting theses)

Why not use OverLeaf?

For those who’ve worked with LaTeX before, one of the key questions you might have here is “why not just use a platform like Overleaf for your academic writing workflow and not worry about setting up a local environment?”. Overleaf is a cloud LaTeX service, that provides a collaborative editing environment, and a range of LaTeX templates. However, it’s not free – plans range from $USD 12-35 per month. Overleaf is based on free and open source software, and then adds a proprietary collaboration layer over the top – it abstracts away complexity – and this is what you pay a monthly fee for.

In principle, I have no issue with cloud platforms adding value to FOSS, and then charging for that value, but I doubt any of the profits from Overleaf are going to folks like John MacFarlane – writer of pandoc, and Donald E. Knuth and Leslie Lamport – who contributed early work to tex and LaTeX respectively. I felt like I owed it to these folx to “dig a little under the hood” and learn some of that complexity instead of outsourcing it away.

So, to the process …

Installing pandoc

Pandoc is a free and open source tool for converting documents between different formats. It’s widely used in academia, and used extensively in publishing and writing workflows. Pandoc is written by John MacFarlane, who is a philosophy professor at UC Berkeley.

One of the other things that John is less known for is Lucida Navajo, which is a font for the Navajo language, a Native American language of the Southern Athabascan family. Although it’s based on Latin, it contains a number of diacritical marks not found in other Latin languages.

Pandoc is available for all platforms, but because my goal here was to develop a workflow on Ubuntu Linux, I’ve only shown installation instructions for that platform.

To install pandoc, use the following command: 

$ sudo apt install pandoc

I also had to make sure that the pandoc-citeproc tool was installed; it’s not installed by default as part of pandoc itself. Again, this was a simple command: 

$ sudo apt install pandoc-citeproc

Installing Zotero and the BetterBibtex extension

My next challenge was to figure out how to do citations with pandoc. In the pandoc documentation, there is a whole section on citations, and this provided some pointers. This blog post from Chris Krycho was also useful in figuring out what to use.

This involved installing the BetterBibtex extension for Zotero (which I already had installed). You can find installation instructions for the BetterBibtex extension here. It has to be downloaded as a file and then added through Zotero (not through Firefox).

BibTex is a citation standard, supported by most academic journals and referencing tools. Google Scholar exports to BibTex.

Once installed, BetterBibtex updates each Zotero reference with a citation key that can then be used as an “at-reference” in pandoc – ie @strengersSmartWifeWhy2020. Updating citation keys can take a few minutes – I have several thousand references stored in Zotero and it took about 6 minutes to ensure that each reference had a BibTex citation key.

In order to use BetterBibtex, I had to make sure that the specific export format for Zotero was Better BibTex, and that Zotero updated on change:

Installing LaTeX

Next, I needed to install LaTeX for Linux. This was installed via the texlive package:

$ sudo apt install texlive Based on this Stack Overflow error message I got early on in testing, I also installed the texlive-latex-extra package. 

$ sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-extra

Zotero citations package for Atom

Next, I needed to configure the Atom IDE to work with Zotero and BetterBibtex. This involved installing several plugins, including;

Once these were installed, I was ready to start experimenting with a workflow.

Experimenting with a workflow

To start with, I used a based workflow to go from a Markdown formatted text file to PDF. pandoc converts this to LaTeX as an interim step, and then to PDF, using the inbuilt templates from pandoc. This first step was a very basic attempt to go from pandoc to PDF, and was designed to “shake out” any issues with software installation.

The pandoc command line options I used to start with were: 

pandoc -f markdown \
  writing.md \
  -o writing.pdf

In this example, I’m telling pandoc to expect markdown-styled input, to use the file writing.md as the input file and to write to the output file writing.pdf. pandoc infers that the output file is PDF-formatted from the .pdf extension.

Adding citations

Next, I wanted to include citations. First, I exported my Zotero citations to a .bib-formatted file, using the BetterBibtex extension. I stored this in a directory called bibliography in the same directory as my writing.md file. The command line options I used here were:

$ pandoc -f markdown \
  --filter=pandoc-citeproc \
  --bibliography=bibliography/blog-post-citations.bib \
  writing.md \
  -o writing.pdf

Note here the two additional commands – the --filter used to invoke pandoc-citeproc, and the --bibliography filter to include a BibTex formatted file. This worked well, and generated a plainly formatted PDF (based on the pandoc default format).

Using a yaml file for metadata

Becoming more advanced with pandoc, I decided to experiment with including a yaml file to help generate the document. The yaml file can specify metadata such as author, date and so on, which can then be substituted into the PDF file – if the intermediary LaTeX template accommodates these values. The basic LaTeX template included with pandoc includes values for author, title, date and abstract.

Here’s the yaml file I used for this example: 

--- 
author: Kathy Reid 
title: blog post on pandoc 
date: December 2020 
abstract: | This is the abstract. 

...

Note that the yaml file must start with three dashes ---and end with three periods ...

The pandoc command line options I used to include metadata were: 

$ pandoc -f markdown+yaml_metadata_block \
  --filter=pandoc-citeproc \
  --bibliography=bibliography/blog-post-citations.bib \
  writing.md metadata.yml \
  -o writing.pdf

Note here that in the -f switch an additional option for yaml_metadata_block is given, and that the yaml file is listed after the first input file, writing.md. By adding the metadata.yml file in the command line, pandoc considers them both to be input files.

By using the yaml file, this automatically appended author, title, date and abstract information to the resulting PDF.

I also found that I could control the margins and paper size of the resulting PDF file by controlling these in the yaml file. 

---
 author: Kathy Reid
 title: blog post on pandoc
 date: December 2020
 abstract: |
   This is the abstract.
 fontsize: 12pt
 papersize: a4
 margin-top: 25mm
   margin-right: 25mm
   margin-bottom: 25mm
   margin-left: 25mm
...

Adding in logging

It took a little while to get the hang of working with yaml, and I wanted a way to be able to inspect the output of the pandoc process. To do this, I added a switch to the command line option, and also piped the output of the command to a logging file. 

$ pandoc -f markdown+yaml_metadata_block \
  --verbose 
  --filter=pandoc-citeproc \
  --bibliography=bibliography/blog-post-citations.bib \
  writing.md metadata.yml \
  -o writing.pdf 
  > pandoc-log.txt

The --verbose switch tells pandoc to use verbose logging, and the logging is piped to pandoc-log.txt. If the output wasn’t piped to a file, it would appear on the screen as stdout, and because it’s verbose, it’s hard to read – it’s much easier to pipe it to a file to inspect it.

Working with other LaTeX templates

Now that I had a Markdown to PDF via LaTeX workflow working reasonably well, it was time to experiment using an academic writing workflow with other templates. Many publications provide a LaTeX template for submission, such as these from the ACM, and ideally I wanted to be able to go from Markdown to a journal template using pandoc.

I’d come across other blog posts where similar goals had been attempted, but this proved significantly harder to implement than I’d anticipated.

My first attempt entailed trying to replicate the work Daniel Graziotin had done here – but I ran into several issues. After copying over the table-filter.py file from the blog post, an ACM .cls file, and copying the ACM pdf file to default.pdf in my pandoc-data directory, and running the below command, I got the following error. 

$ pandoc -f markdown+yaml_metadata_block \
  --verbose \
  --data-dir=pandoc-data \
  --variable documentclass=acmart \
  --variable classname=acmlarge \
  --filter=pandoc-citeproc \
  --filter=table-filter.py \
  --bibliography=bibliography/blog-post-citations.bib \
  writing.md metadata-acm.yml \
  -o writing.pdf
Error running filter table-filter.py:
Could not find executable python

My first thought was that python somehow was aliased to an older version of python – ie python 2. To verify this I ran: 

$ which python

This didn’t return anything, which explained the error. From this, I assumed that pandoc was expecting that the python alias resolved to the current python. I didn’t know how to change this – for example changing the pandoc preferences to point to the right python binary. Instead, I created a symlink so that pandoc could find python3.

$ pwd
/usr/bin
$ ls | grep python 
python3 
python3.8 
python3.8-config 
python3-config 
python3-futurize 
python3-pasteurize 
x86_64-linux-gnu-python3.8-config 
x86_64-linux-gnu-python3-config 
$ sudo ln -s python3 python

Installing pandocfilters package for Python

I attempted to run the pandoc command again but ran into another error. 

Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "table-filter.py", line 6, in 
     import pandocfilters as pf
 ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pandocfilters'
 Error running filter table-filter.py:
 Filter returned error status 1

My guess here was that the python module pandocfilters had not been installed via pip. I installed this through pip. 

$ pip3 install pandocfilters
Collecting pandocfilters
Downloading pandocfilters-1.4.3.tar.gz (16 kB)
Building wheels for collected packages: pandocfilters
Building wheel for pandocfilters (setup.py) … done
Created wheel for pandocfilters: filename=pandocfilters-1.4.3-py3-none-any.whl size=7991 sha256=3c4445092ee0c8b00e2eab814ad69ca91d691d2567c12adbc4bcc4fb82928701
Stored in directory: /home/kathyreid/.cache/pip/wheels/fc/39/52/8d6f3cec1cca4ceb44d658427c35711b19d89dbc4914af657f
Successfully built pandocfilters
Installing collected packages: pandocfilters
Successfully installed pandocfilters-1.4.3

This again swapped one error for another. 

Error producing PDF.
! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}.
See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type H for immediate help.
…
l.55 u

Luckily, I had set –verbose, and piped to a log file. I went digging through the log file to see if I could find anything useful. 

Class acmart Warning: You do not have the libertine package installed. Please upgrade your TeX on input line 669.
Class acmart Warning: You do not have the zi4 package installed. Please upgrade your TeX on input line 672.
Class acmart Warning: You do not have the newtxmath package installed. Please upgrade your TeX on input line 675.

After reading through this Stack Overflow article, these all looked like font issues. I used the solution given in the Stack Overflow article, which was to install another Ubuntu package: 

$ sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-extra

Again, this swapped one error message for another. 

! LaTeX Error: Command `\Bbbk' already defined.
See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type H for immediate help.
…
l.261 …ol{\Bbbk} {\mathord}{AMSb}{"7C}
! ==> Fatal error occurred, no output PDF file produced!
Transcript written on ./tex2pdf.-bf3aef739e05d883/input.log.
Error producing PDF.
! LaTeX Error: Command `\Bbbk' already defined.
See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type H for immediate help.
…
l.261 …ol{\Bbbk} {\mathord}{AMSb}{"7C}

Another Google search, another solution from Stack Overflow, which suggested removing the LaTeX line \usepackage{amssymb} from the template. The challenge was, I wasn’t sure where the LaTeX template for pandoc was stored. Reading through this Stack Overflow post, it looked liked the default LaTeX template is stored at:

~/.pandoc/templates

But on my system, this directory didn’t exist. I created it, and used a command to store a default LaTeX file in there. Then I was able to remove the line. 

\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}

This then resulted in yet another error which required Googling. 

! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}.See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type H for immediate help
…l.54 u
sepackage{booktabs} setcopyright{acmcopyright} doi{10.475/123_4}
! ==> Fatal error occurred, no output PDF file produced!

Looking through the log file, this was generated by the parskip.sty package. More Googling revealed another incompatibility with the ACM class. I removed the parskip package from the LaTeX default template, but was continually met with similar errors.

Parting thoughts

In the end I gave up trying to get this academic writing workflow to function with an ACM template; there were too many inconsistencies and errors for it to be workable, and I’d already sunk several hours into it.

On the plus side though, I learned a lot about pandoc, how to reference with it, and how to produce simple LaTeX documents with this workflow.

What sort of academic writing workflow do you use?