Pandoc

Pandoc

https://pandoc.org/

You can use Pandoc to generate PDF's directly from other document formats, like Markdown, wikitext, Libre Office, slides, InDesign ICML files, or PDF.

Pandoc is described as an "universal document converter": it converts documents from one markup language into another.

Extensive documentation: Pandoc’s Manual or man pandoc

Pandoc common arguments

-f or --from - option standing for “from”, is followed by the input format

-t or --to - option standing for “to”, is followed by the output format

-S or --standalone - option standing for “standalone”, produces output with an appropriate header and footer

-s or --stylesheet - option to use a CSS stylesheet

-o or --output - option for file output

Pandoc stdin and stdout

By default, Pandoc can take stdin as an input.

Likewise, Pandoc also writes its output to stdout by default.

An example of using the stdin: if you use a pipeline to get your text from a pad, you can use curl to download this text and pipe it into Pandoc:

$ curl https://pad.xpub.nl/p/collaborations/export/txt | pandoc --from markdown --to html

This will output HTML in your terminal.

An example of using the stdout: if you want to turn this HTML page into a PDF, for example using Weasyprint, you can pipe the output of Pandoc into Weasyprint:

$ curl https://pad.xpub.nl/p/collaborations/export/txt | pandoc --from markdown --to html | weasyprint - pad.pdf

Note that Weasyprint (and many other programs) use a dash - as a special symbol to use stdin as input.

Changing the default template

$ pandoc --from markdown --to html --print-default-template=html5 > template.html
$ pandoc --from markdown --to html --template template.html input.md -o output.html

PDF

A range of PDF engines are supported at the moment, including Paged.js, weasyprint and LaTeX. You need to select the one of choice using the --pdf-engine option, and have the PDF engine installed on your computer.

You can follow this page for instructions: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#creating-a-pdf

Examples

STRING to MARKDOWN

$ echo "Hello Pandoc from html to markdown" | pandoc -f html -t markdown

WIKI to HTML

• Save the content of a wiki page on to a plain-text file, example: page.wiki
• convert mediawiki to html:

$ pandoc page.wiki -f mediawiki -t html -o page.html

WIKI to HTML to PDF to BOOKLET PDF

MediaWiki provides a way to get the content of a page in wikitext or HTML:

• https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Wordhole?action=raw (wikitext)
• https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Wordhole?action=render (HTML)

You can use Weasyprint to generate a PDF from an URL!

$ weasyprint -s stylesheet.css https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Wordhole?action=render wordhole.pdf

Another example:

$ curl https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Voting_by_show_of_hands?action=raw > Voting_by_show_of_hands.mediawiki

$ pandoc --from mediawiki --to html Voting_by_show_of_hands.mediawiki --output Voting_by_show_of_hands.html

$ weasyprint Voting_by_show_of_hands.html Voting_by_show_of_hands.pdf

And to make a booklet PDF:

$ pdfbook2 --paper=a4paper --short-edge --no-crop Voting_by_show_of_hands.pdf

PAD to MARKDOWN to HTML to PDF to BOOKLET PDF

In one pipeline:

$ curl https://pad.xpub.nl/p/collaborations/export/txt | pandoc --from markdown --to html | weasyprint -s stylesheet.css - pad.pdf

or in multiple lines, and with in between moments of saving the content to files:

$ curl https://pad.xpub.nl/p/collaborations/export/txt > pad.md 

$ pandoc --from markdown --to html pad.md --output pad.html 

$ weasyprint -s stylesheet.css pad.html pad.pdf

And to make a booklet PDF:

$ pdfbook2 --paper=a4paper pad.pdf
$ pdfbook2 --paper=a4paper --short-edge --no-crop pad.pdf