On August 3, 2006, John Mac Farlane released the first version of pandoc, a document converter initially written in Haskell. Starting with support for Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, pandoc has evolved significantly over two decades.

Initially a personal project born from a desire to learn Haskell and manage academic work, pandoc's architecture—parsing into an abstract syntax tree before rendering—proved extensible. Early contributions, like Recai Oktaş's Debian packaging and the release on Hackage, increased its visibility. Subsequent versions introduced support for numerous formats like RTF, DocBook, man pages, ConTeXt, MediaWiki, GNU Texinfo, and OpenDocument.

The project gained further traction with features like fenced code blocks, syntax highlighting (via highlighting-kate), and automatic citation support using CSL styles. Key developments include a flexible templating system, EPUB and DOCX output, and the ability to create custom writers in Lua. Pandoc's journey from a simple converter to a widely used tool reflects its adaptability and the collaborative efforts of its community.