Markdown Document For Printing

For quick printed documents like letters, I like to write in Markdown and convert to PDF with Pandoc.

Pandoc lets you put a YAML block at the beginning of the document with variables that affect the paper size, margins, PDF metadata, etc. I always forget what those options are, so I wanted to have a starter document that I could copy and edit at will.

To use:

1. Copy the document doc.markdown
2. Edit it
3. Convert to PDF with Pandoc: pandoc doc.markdown -o doc.pdf

Give yourself a Vim macro:

:nmap <Buffer> <Leader>p :w \| :!pandoc -o %.pdf %<CR>

For more complicated documents, I also have a project template for a LaTeX article: https://github.com/sleepymurph/template_latex_article

Notes

A4 paper

Note that this template insists on A4 paper because I live in Europe. This is set by the papersize: a4 in the YAML header. Delete or change that as needed.

If you do change it, note that the Pandoc LaTeX template concatenates paper to the papersize setting. So papersize: a4 becomes \documentclass[a4paper]{article} in the LaTeX. So whatever paper size you use, you need to leave the paper part off of the papersize option.

Remembering exactly how to set this is probably the biggest reason I need this template.

Dependency: Open Sans

Open Sans is the official font at the university where I work. Therefore it is the default font for my templates.

This means that this template requires the opensans package for LaTeX. On Ubuntu this package is part of the texlive-fonts-extra package.

apt install texlive-fonts-extra

Or you can use a different font by editing the file. Edit or remove the fontfamily and fontfamilyoptions values in the YAML block.

Trade-off: Open Sans vs full UTF-8 support

This method of switching to Open Sans only works with the default pdflatex engine. And the pdflatex engine has impartial UTF-8 support. The Pandoc LaTeX template (and my LaTeX template) use the inputenc package for partial support. This works for most of my purposes, but it can still give errors like the following:

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char А (U+410)
(inputenc)                not set up for use with LaTeX.

See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              
                                                  
l.66 ...YZŽabcčćdđefghijklmnopqrsštuvwxyzžА

Try running pandoc with --latex-engine=xelatex.
pandoc: Error producing PDF

shell returned 43

If you switch to xelatex for better UTF-8 support, the document will no longer be in Open Sans:

pandoc doc.markdown -o doc.markdown.pdf --latex-engine=xelatex

Apparently fonts work completely differently in XeLaTeX, and I have not had a chance to figure that out.

TODO: Figure out how to get Open Sans with xelatex too.

More options

Options to set can be found by looking at Pandoc's LaTeX template.

On my Ubuntu system, that lives at /usr/share/pandoc/data/templates/default.latex

Look for directives that are surrounded by dollar signs:

$if(geometry)$
\usepackage[$for(geometry)$$geometry$$sep$,$endfor$]{geometry}
$endif$

Here we see geometry used in a loop. So it would seem that we can create an array in the YAML with an array of configuration options for the geometry package.