mdocu

mdocu is a small Python program that I've put together after getting more and more interested in Markdown and Pandoc. It all started after talking to Jonas Björk about writing all documentation in Markdown to speed up the process of writing. I started thinking of a way to combine Markdown with LaTeX (I really like LaTeX) and found out about Pandoc after some googling around. Pandoc can convert many formats into many more formats, including Markdown to LaTeX (and PDF from LaTeX). To make the document look better you have to write a template in LaTeX and append a lot of options and arguments to Pandoc. Therefor I started writing a Python program to quickly make a PDF out of any Markdown file with great result. So that is what this tiny Python program is all about; to make a nice-looking PDF out of any Markdown document.

Installation

To install mdocu simply run the script install.sh as root or with sudo priviledges, for example sudo ./install.sh or if you're using su to become root run:

su
./install.sh

Uninstall

If you which to remove all files provided by mdocu from the system simply run the script uninstall.sh as either root or as a regular user with sudo priviledges, for example sudo ./uninstall.sh.

Required packages

mdocu is depending on LaTeX and Pandoc. On Ubuntu and Debian systems these can all be installed with the command below:

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-extra pandoc pandoc-citeproc \
texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-extra 

For non-english writers

If you're writing a document that's non-english you'll also need a language pack for your language. These packages are called texlive-lang-swedish for example for swedish. Please note that you'll also need to change the line \usepackage[english]{babel} to the language your writing in, for example swedish will become \usepackage[swedish]{babel}. You'll need to change this for both /usr/share/mdocu/with-titlepage.tex and /usr/share/mdocu/without-titlepage.tex.

Usage

usage: makepdf [-h] [--notoc] [--notitle] [-o OUTPUT] filename

positional arguments:
  filename                      the markdown-file you wish to convert

optional arguments:
  -h, --help                    show this help message and exit
  --notoc                       don't make any table of contents
  --notitle                     don't include a titlepage
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT    save file into OUTPUT

Customziation

The system-wide templates are placed in /usr/share/mdocu/. To make custom versions of these templates for the current users, simply copy the the two templates from /usr/share/mdocu/ into ~/.mdocu/. When the makepdf command is executed, it first looks for the templates in ~/mdocu/, and if these can't be found, it uses the system-wide templates from /usr/share/mdocu/.

Example

makepdf example.md --notoc -o example.pdf will produce a PDF-file called example.pdf from the markdown file example.md with no table of contents (but with a title page). By default if no -o option is given, the PDF-file will be save in out.pdf. By default mdocu will both create a table of content and a nice looking title page. Please note that you'll need to customize the title page by your own. This is done in either the system-wide /usr/share/mdocu/with-titlepage.tex or ~/.mdocu/with-titlepage.tex for the current user.

Thanks

Thanks to Jonas Björk for mentioning that Markdown can be an easy and powerful system for writing quick documents.

Copyright

mdocu is released under GNU General Public Licence by Jack-Benny Persson at getDevNull.