Re: Markdown to PDF

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

Sphinx sounds pretty great, Elisa. Your situation sounds similar to mine,
where you're working very closely with the developers. I don't work with
any Python guys (that I know of), but they'd probably like
ReStructuredText.

Thank you and everyone else on this thread for your suggestions. Much
appreciated.

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 11:00 AM, Elisa R. Sawyer <elisawyer -at- gmail -dot- com>
wrote:

> Hi Ryan,
>
> You've already gotten a few good suggestions, and I have one add to the
> list.
>
> Markdown is by design simple and therefore limited. LaTeX allows for
> precise formatting, but it might be difficult to get your build to create
> pdf's of the quality you want using Markdown. Moving toward Docbook is one
> possibility, but there is another, somewhat more developer-friendly
> solution--ReStructuredText using Sphinx, which can be considered a slightly
> more grown-up version of Markdown:
>
> You can find information on several Web sites:
>
> http://sphinx-doc.org/contents.html
> http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
> http://pedrokroger.net/using-sphinx-write-technical-books/
>
> To get a pdf from Sphinx you need to install a pdflatex plugin. The
> details of what you need vary with operating system.
>
> I inherited a set of docs that were created using Sphinx and had to find
> my way around the process of editing in .rst files and building both HTML
> and pdf output. I'm using Sublime Text with several plugins, on a Mac with
> OS X Yosemite. I'm still learning some of the finer points but think that
> this has a lot of potential.
>
> In my case, I discovered that I can get some developer input when I hit a
> road block with a specific issue, which makes the process fun and
> interesting. This happens because Sphinx is seen as a tool for python
> developers. I don't think that it's any more difficult to tweak the build
> for good pdf's from this setup than it is to tweak DITA-OT or Docbook.
>
> -Elisa
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 8:56 PM, Ryan Young <ryangyoung -at- gmail -dot- com> 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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>
>
> --
> Elisa Rood Sawyer
> ~~~~~^~~~~~
> Technical and Creative Writer
> "Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today." Mark Twain
>
>
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