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.
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
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.
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
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: 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
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/.
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 to Jonas Björk for mentioning that Markdown can be an easy and powerful system for writing quick documents.
mdocu is released under GNU General Public Licence by Jack-Benny Persson at getDevNull.