bool appends the colon itself, so this has to be a label, not a sentence.

prefComponents/common/bool/index.vue renders <span>{{ description }}:</span>, so every switch description gets a trailing colon. On screen this row reads:

Show the Pandoc conversion menu. Requires Pandoc to be installed.:

Two sentences, a full stop, then the component's colon. Every other description in this pane is a short label with no terminal punctuation — "Wrap text in table of contents", "Open folders in new window", "Restore previous editor state" — which is why they come out clean. This is the only one written as prose.

The requirement sentence is worth keeping, just not here: bool already accepts detailedDescription, which renders it in the tooltip behind the info icon. preferences.search.items.showPandocConvert can keep the full sentence as-is — full sentences are the convention in that bucket.

The same edit is needed in the other 11 locales; zh-CN currently renders 「显示 Pandoc 转换菜单。需要先安装 Pandoc。:」.

Found on PATH never shows a path on the platforms where it is most likely to matter.

An absolute path only comes out of here when MARKTEXT_PANDOC is set or one of the Windows well-known folders hits. An ordinary macOS/Linux install falls through to commandExists.sync('pandoc'), which answers yes/no and nothing else — so Found: {path} is effectively Windows-only, and everyone else always sees Found on PATH.

That inverts what point 3 set out to do. Tested here on macOS with pandoc 3.11 at /opt/homebrew/bin/pandoc: the pane says Found on PATH, which describes how the lookup was done rather than answering which binary was found — the question a user actually has when two pandocs are installed.

Suggest resolving the bare name to a real file so every platform lands in the Found: {path} branch: walk process.env.PATH (honouring PATHEXT on win32) and return the first executable match. onPath then drops out of the IPC payload, foundOnPath drops out of the 12 locale files, and pandocSwitchState() is left with found/not-found. pandocLocations() already resolves candidates to files, so this stays in the same shape as the code around it.

Worth not reaching for the which package to do it: it is in the store as a transitive dep but is not declared in packages/desktop/package.json, and importing an undeclared package is exactly what broke #5159.

One edge to keep: if the lookup cannot produce a path but commandExists says yes, fall back to a generic "found" note rather than reporting Not found.

The new guard compares keys and types, but not values, and only in one direction.

A new preference whose schema.json default and static/preference.json value disagree passes both assertions — and the two files resolve differently depending on the path: Preference.init() writes static/preference.json wholesale on first launch, while a key that was pruned and back-filled comes from the schema, and PREFERENCES.md publishes the schema value as authoritative. That is the same silent-divergence class as the restart bug this spec was written for.

Comparing entry.default against defaults[key] closes it. Heads up that four existing pairs disagree today (followSystemTheme, codeBlockLineNumbers, wrapCodeBlocks, fileSortBy), so the assertion needs a decision about those — aligning them here, or landing the assertion in a follow-up — rather than being added blind.

The reverse direction is worth a line too: a key in static/preference.json with no schema.json entry is written and read with no type validation and no declared default — the mirror image of the bug this PR fixes.

One IPC payload, three independent declarations.

PandocCommandInfo here, the inline { command: string | null; onPath: boolean } at src/shared/types/ipc.ts:73, and PandocProbe at prefComponents/general/pandoc.ts:2 all describe the same object, and nothing links them. Rename a field on the main side and vue-tsc stays green while probe.command is undefined at runtime, which makes pandocSwitchState report Not found on a machine that has pandoc installed.

The repo CLAUDE.md is explicit about where this belongs: "Cross-process types live in packages/desktop/src/shared/types/", with the channel contract in ipc.ts. Declared once there and imported on both sides, the failure mode is gone.

The only handler in this file without an error path.

mt::cmd::exists right above wraps its body and answers false on throw. This one calls resolvePandocCommand(), which reads process.env.MARKTEXT_PANDOC, lstats up to six candidate paths through isFile2, then shells out via commandExists.sync. Any throw rejects the invoke, and the renderer awaits it inside a bare onMounted(async () => …) whose promise Vue never inspects — so it surfaces as an unhandled rejection, pandocProbe stays null, and the pane shows no status line at all with nothing in the log tying it to pandoc.

A Windows install path is one unbreakable token, and the note has no wrapping rule.

.notes (pages/preference.vue:98) is display: block with no overflow-wrap/word-break. The paths pandocLocations() returns — %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WinGet\Links\pandoc.exe, %USERPROFILE%\scoop\shims\pandoc.exe — usually contain no space and no /, and CSS offers no break opportunity at \, so Found: {path} becomes a single word. Inside .pref-content (max-width: calc(100vw - var(--prefSideBarWidth))) it overflows and gives the settings window a horizontal scrollbar — on the platform this feature targets. overflow-wrap: anywhere on the note fixes it.

These three assertions test the SFC's source text, not its behavior.

pandocBlock() reads index.vue as a string and slices between <compound and </compound>, then matches the literals :disable="pandocDisabled" and :notes=. Renaming the computed, writing <Bool, reordering attributes, or Prettier moving /> onto its own line turns the suite red with no behavior change; conversely it stays green for any wiring that merely spells those attributes correctly. The pure-function cases above them are the part carrying real value — I'd drop these three rather than keep assertions that can only be wrong in both directions.

This move left a comment pointing at a submenu that no longer holds these targets.

utils/pandoc.ts:10 still reads Targets offered by "Export → Convert with Pandoc", while the entry is now a sibling of Export ▸. It is the only in-repo description of where the nine targets surface, so the next reader goes looking under Export and doesn't find them.

Worth adding: a manual re-check button beside the status.

The probe runs once, on mount. A user who reads "Not found", installs pandoc, and returns to the still-open settings window is told the same thing, and this pane is the only place the app reports detection. An explicit button is clearer here than re-probing on focus or on a timer.

There is a precedent in prefComponents/image/components/uploader/index.vue — the PicGo detection block with its re-test button. Worth taking the button and nothing else: that block also polls every 30s with exponential backoff to five minutes (scheduleNextDetection, :404), keeps three timers, inserts two artificial 500ms delays in manualDetection (:585), and hardcodes toLocaleString('zh-CN', …) in its timestamps. For pandoc it is a button plus an isProbing ref around the invoke that already exists.

One layout note: the status rides on compound's notes prop deliberately, so a disabled bool does not dim the line explaining why it is disabled. A button needs its own markup — rendering the status and the button in the #children slot as a sibling of <bool> keeps that property without touching the shared compound.

Nit: userPreference.getAll() returns IUserPreferences, which this PR just taught about showPandocConvert (shared/types/preferences.ts:75), so the widened assertion is no longer buying anything and turns a checked read into an unchecked one. Dropping it type-checks on its own.