Pandoc

Pandoc is a Haskell library and command-line tool to convert markup files (Markdown, LaTeX, HTML), it’s also can produce PDF output. TODO: add source

It supports a dozen input/output formats, you can check this by running pandoc --list-input-formats and pandoc --list-output-formats commands, or use the --from and --to options to select formats interactively.

Pandoc supports Markdown with various features like: syntax for tables, definition lists, metadata blocks, footnotes, citations, math, and much more.

Program has modular design and use AST to represent documents. Reader modules - parse text in a given format and produce a native representation of the document (AST). Writer modules convert this AST into a target format. Using this design adding an input or output format requires only adding a reader or writer. Users also can run custom pandoc filters to modify the intermediate AST.

Pandoc limitations are happens because intermediate representation of a document is less expressive than many of the formats it converts between, and you can lose specific data. Pandoc give more attention to structural elements of a document, but not formatting details like margin size. One of the best conversion results can be received from pandoc Markdown to other formats, less expressive formats conversions can be lossy.

Basic pandoc usage

• Convert file to PDF (the output format is determined by file extension):

pandoc input.md -o output.pdf

• Force conversion to use a specific format (format is GFM, but file format is markdown):

pandoc input.docx --to gfm -o output.md

• Convert to a standalone file with the appropriate headers/footers (valid HTML file including and ):

pandoc input.md -s -o output.html

Usage example

# Convert markdown with linked bibtex cites
pandoc -C \
       -t gfm  \
       -f markdown+raw_html \
       --bibliography=books/library.bib \
       --wrap=preserve --reference-links \
       --csl=books/research-institute-for-nature-and-forest.csl \
       -M reference-section-title=References \
       --mathjax \
       -o $out_file \
       "$file" && \

• -t - input format gfm TODO: add this heading/note
• -f - output format (markdown+raw_html)
• --wrap=preserve - preserve line breaks
• --csl=books/research-institute-for-nature-and-forest.csl - citation style
• --bibliography=books/library.bib - BibTeX file (exported from Zotero)
• -M reference-section-title=References - title of the bibliography section
• --mathjax - use MathJax to render math

Tools

• Try pandoc!

References

• How to make a scientific looking PDF from markdown (with bibliography) · GitHub