Re: Markdown to PDF

[Ryan Young <ryangyoung -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Thanks for your suggestions, Mark. I believe LaTex is more than capable
with formatting, but the problem is that, at the moment, the docs are a
hybrid of Markdown and LaTex. The engineers started writing in Tex, but
realized that it was overkill and moved to Markdown (Pandoc's flavor
<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/demo/example9/pandocs-markdown.html>).
They use Pandoc to convert from MD to PDF and a LaTex .cls file to control
the look of the output.

I like the idea of going to HTML and then to PDF because I'm more familiar
with CSS. I'll look into the FO options, but I'm hoping that this scenario
won't be permanent and the learning curve for FO is too steep for a quick
fix.

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 10:40 PM, Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net> wrote:

> My understanding is that LaTex is pretty capable with formatting. Are you
> sure you are finding the right docs to tell you how to do it?
>
> But if that doesn't work, you could use Pandoc to output to DocBook XML.
> Then you can use the DocBook output toolchain (free) to get a lot of
> control over it. If you really need to get picky with the PDF you can get
> into modifying the XSL-FO that is produced, but that might be more than you
> want to get into. The free XSL-FO processor (Apache FOP) is not as good at
> some things as one of the commercial FO processors (mainly Antenna House or
> RenderX XEP).
>
> Or you could output to HTML and then use CSS and a formatter like
> PrinceXML (commercial) to create PDF. You might need to use some
> proprietary PrinceXML CSS stuff to get certain formatting effects because
> CSS is not as capable as XSL-FO (not yet anyway).
>
> Mark Giffin
> Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.
> http://markgiffin.com/
>
>
> On 2/18/2015 8:56 PM, Ryan Young wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> At my new job, what documentation there is is in Markdown. The engineers
>> set up a script using pandoc to create some functional PDF output. The
>> problem is that pandoc requires LaTex to produce the PDF, which doesn't
>> give me very much control of things like the location of images in the
>> document (or the ability to create links).
>>
>> I've played around with Atom and SublimeText, but neither gives me all
>> that
>> much more control over the PDF output. I've also suggested the company
>> start using Confluence, which would solve the problem, but it seems like
>> that will take a bit of planning.
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>>
>>
>
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