How to convert a markdown file to PDF?

It feels like it has become a bit trickier to do so, but pandoc should do most of the work, here. For example, on a Debian-like system for installation commands:

sudo apt install pandoc
pandoc --from=markdown --to=pdf in.md --output out.pdf

You probably don't need to specify the file types, but it seems better to get in the habit of over-specifying things.

I say that it'll do "most of the work," because pandoc actually farms out the final PDF conversion by producing an intermediate step, LaTeX by default. My machine, for example, doesn't have the LaTeX engine that it expects and I couldn't figure out what to install quickly enough for this response, so I needed to find an alternative and specify it, settling on weasyprint, which takes its side-trip through HTML instead of LaTeX.

sudo apt install weasyprint
pandoc --from=markdown --to=pdf in.md --output out.pdf --pdf-engine=weasyprint

This does preserve the emoji, which comes as a pleasant surprise to me, too.

In any case, this gets you a fairly boring PDF, looking a lot like a web page, which might do the trick. From there, though, you can go in more sophisticated directions. If, for example, you install texlive-latex-base, that will (should?) serve as the default LaTeX-to-PDF converter. You don't want to start there, because you'll need to configure all the LaTeX templates and stylesheets to get a valid conversion, which becomes an annoying tradeoff of how much effort you want to put in versus how much you want to change the look of the PDF.

I haven't seen any GUI interfaces that save you from the command-line, but they must exist, even if they only issue the pandoc command on selected files.

posted about 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

John C‭

81 reputation 0 1 8 0

You could use the LaTeX markdown package to create a pdf.

To make sure that the coloured emoji are visible:

• choose a unicode-aware engine like lualatex
• choose a font which has coloured emoji, e.g. Noto Color Emoji

Assuming your markdown file is called test.md, the create a .tex with the content as shown below and compile it with lualatex --shell-escape <name of .tex file>.

\documentclass{article} 

\usepackage{markdown}
\usepackage{fontspec}

% from https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/572220/36296
\directlua{luaotfload.add_fallback
   ("emojifallback",
    {
      "NotoColorEmoji:mode=harf;"
    }
   )}

\setmainfont{Arial}[RawFeature={fallback=emojifallback}]

\begin{document} 

\markdownInput{test.md} 

\end{document}

posted about 1 year ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

1y ago

samcarter‭

161 reputation 0 4 16 9

See repo: PDF to Markdown Wrapper (pdftomd.sh) is a RAG workflow-friendly enhancement of Marker that converts a PDF into a single markdown file. It handles GPU and PyTorch configuration, document splitting and chunking, image BASE64 embedding, LLM post-processing and cleanup, and consolidation of output

https://github.com/ngpepin/pdftomd-RAG

• Splits large PDFs into chunks (100 pages by default, 10 pages when -l/--llm is enabled) and runs Marker once on the chunk folder (avoids repeated model loads).
• Consolidates all chunk markdown into a single .md file.
• Optionally embeds images as Base64 (no external asset folders needed).
• Optional text-only output that strips image links from the final markdown.
• Optional OCR pass via bundled ocr-pdf/ocr-pdf.sh before conversion.
• Optional LLM helper via a built-in Marker --use_llm.
• Automatically uses GPU when available and installs CUDA-enabled torch when needed.
• Cleans up intermediate files and attempts to stop spawned processes on exit.
• Optional supplemental LLM post-processing step with --clean.
• The overall result can be a much cleaner more streamlined end product more suited to RAG pipeline ingestion.

posted 23 days ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

ngpepin‭

-5 reputation 0 1 -3 0