Pandoc

Overview

Pandoc is an extension to MarkDown providing support for a number of document formats.

This is an extremely powerful and easy-to-use tool and well worth looking at.

Create Standalone HTML Document

   $ pandoc --output test.html --standalone --toc test.mdml
   $ man pandoc # for more information

Creating a PDF Document

Earlier versions of Pandoc included markdown2pdf that is no longer needed as Pandoc now includes the ability to create PDFs.

This is the old markdown2pdf usage:

   $ markdown2pdf --output test.pdf test.mdml
   $ man markdown2pdf # for more information

The same with later versions of Pandoc (e.g. 1.9.4.2)

   $ pandoc --toc --output test.pdf test.md

Pandoc requires pdflatex to create PDFs. In Debian 8 (Jessie) installing the texlive package should install all required dependencies. If not, you could also consider installing packages such as texlive-lang-all, texlive-lang-english and texlive-latex-extra.

– Frank Dean - 2 Aug 2016

Creating an ebook

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/epub.html

Page Breaks

You can use inline (LaTeX) to create page breaks. Newpage forces a new page. Pagebreak encourages a page break.

\newpage
\pagebreak

Trouble-shooting

Package inputenc Error: Unicode char—(inputenc) not set up for use with LaTeX

Additionally, the error message suggests *Try running pandoc with
--latex-engine=xelatex* – Which should fix the issue.  E.g.

    $ pandoc --pdf-engine=xelatex --toc --output test.pdf test.md

You may also need to specify a different font which has the unicode
  characters in it.  E.g. on macOS:

    $ pandoc --pdf-engine=xelatex -V 'mainfont:Helvetica Neue' --toc \
    --output test.pdf test.md

– Frank Dean - 27 Nov 2025

Resources

Pandoc mode for Emacs

Related Topics: CreatingDocuments, DocumentFormats, MarkDown, LaTeX

– Frank Dean - 10 Aug 2009