What we need to know here is that there are some functionalities that LaTeX has are not built-in in Pandoc, and we will need filters for that.įilters are easy to install and they are usually well documented. For a more in depth explanation see the docs. The Pandoc command (command line) has an option to pass filters, which are like extensions to the internal representation that Pandoc creates when reading/writing documents.

Installing Pandoc is very easy, since they provide package installers for many different platforms. Now let’s see how to configure our desired environment. It’s possible to convert the Markdown input file to LaTeX (or other formats) if necessary, in case it’s really not possible to do what you want directly in Markdown.

You can use LaTeX directly in Markdown.

Commands and markup are simpler than in LaTeX.

Pandoc uses LaTeX to produce the final PDF file, so what we are actually doing is incorporating everything that is good in LaTeX into a simpler markup language, where editing the source code is more visual appealing and easier to understand: Since LaTeX already works the way we want (and does it pretty well), why would we want to mess with that and change an entire framework that has been working great for years? It has everything we need to achieve our proposed writing framework. Looking at the list above, one can see the power of Pandoc. Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library.Įxamples of the markups that Pandoc handles are HTML (.html), Microsoft Word (.docx), LaTeX and LaTeX Beamer (.tex), Markdown (.md), Org mode (.org), PDF (.pdf), among many, many others. It lets you easily define headings, use basic text formatting tools such as bold, italics and underlines, place links and images, etc. Wikipedia defines Markdown as a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax. In order to do that we resort to a library named Pandoc, which is able to convert documents from one format to another seamlessly.īefore jumping into the technical details though, we first present what are these tools, for the unfamiliar reader, and our motivation.

This includes being able to use most of the capabilities that LaTeX has directly in Markdown. In this post we are interested in using Markdown to produce great quality, scientific PDF files.

Pandoc markdown