I'd love to hear everyone's favorite way to convert markdown to PDF. I'm looking for the easiest, most straightforward option.>From what I've gathered, the method needs to include something like LaTeX in order to have it paginate correctly, so I'll need to install that as well. Is this correct? When I've used the simple export-to-PDF options in Marked, MMD Composer, or Byword, I get one document that is a single, super long page. I think the other formatting from theme has converted correctly, though, like fonts & colors.I see that there are a few drag and drop conversion tools, but unfortunately those don't seem to include a PDF option. Are my only options to use a Terminal-based tool? I'd prefer not to use Terminal (but realize I may not have a choice), but that's only because I use it so rarely I have to relearn the commands and how to navigate between directories each time. I know, I should be embarrassed to admit that, but Terminal is just not in my normal life's typical workflow! Any suggestions would be much appreciated! -- Nicole C -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/attachments/20120227/296756cb/attachment.htm>
I assume MMD composer offers a built-in way to do this, but I'm not a user, so I'm not sure. [pandoc] should work with the [BasicTeX] install, which is much smaller than the full MacTeX install. It used to be a bit of a pain to install pandoc, but there is now a simple Mac installer, so that is no longer an issue. If you want to avoid the terminal, I know of a few good options, but they all require being familiar enough to write a one-line shell script wrapper calling your favorite converter. One is to use [platypus] to make a drag and drop applet that wraps around a one-line shell script calling pandoc. Another would be to use Automator to do the same thing. With Automator, you can also create a system service that calls a shell script---I used to have some of these cooked up for use with WriteRoom, and they worked fine. If you want, I could try to dig them up and post them somewhere. If you don't use the terminal much, you probably don't use an advanced text editor like TextMate, Emacs, or Vim. If you do, there are good plugins for MMD and Pandoc for all three (the TextMate plugin for pandoc is a bit out of date, I'm afraid) that make conversion to PDF just a keystroke away, without having to mess around in the terminal. Best, David [pandoc]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ [BasicTeX]: http://www.tug.org/mactex/2011/morepackages.html [platypus]: http://sveinbjorn.org/platypus
On Feb 27, 2012, at 5:11 PM, Nicole C wrote:> I'd love to hear everyone's favorite way to convert markdown to PDF. I'm looking for the easiest, most straightforward option.We all have different ideas about what?s easy or straightforward, but I use `wkhtmltopdf`. https://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/ The basic steps (which I have automated in TextMate) are: 1. Convert to HTML 2. Add <html>, <head>, <body>, and some CSS 3. Convert to PDF with something like `wkhtmltopdf -t --outline original.html result.pdf` -- Rob McBroom <http://www.skurfer.com/>
if your only desire is to get a .pdf, there are many solutions out there. but that ignores a lot of variables that might be important to people, such as font, fontsize, leading, etc. incorporating c.s.s. can help that; but even so, there are factors that matter, like pagesize, margins, etc. and on top of that are page-related phenomena, e.g., runheads, footers, footnotes, page-numbers, and so on. it can even become more complicated, what with internal .pdf links, such as the reference to "chapter 2" inside of chapter 10, index items, and the like. so let's a lot of room for improvement if you want to succeed in this arena... -bowerbird p.s. happy february 29th! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/attachments/20120229/11acfa0e/attachment.htm>