md2pdf is a little project that aims to make it easy to produce professional-looking PDF documents from Markdown files via a LaTeX template and the help of Pandoc.
There are several motivations for this:
- Word processor software does not work very nicely with version control, plain-text Markdown files do
- Collaborating on a single ODT/DOC file is prone to overwriting others' work
- LibreOffice and Word both suck with automatic figure and table numbering on long files, and with TOCs etc
- It's painful trying to keep everyone using the right font, spacing, formatting, etc. when collaborating with ODT/DOC files
- PDF output from LibreOffice and Word often looks pretty average
- It's distracting having to worry about formatting while writing - Markdown takes away all but the most basic formatting options to focus you on writing
With with an appropriate template, LaTeX PDF output is undeniably the prettiest- looking way to create documents. But, learning LaTeX is hard. Markdown is much easier to use, and when used with Pandoc can still produce superb PDF documents. md2pdf makes it simple to manage having the right LaTeX templates and configuration across a whole team, by using a central server to do the PDF generation and then share the result with those who need it.
This simple Python program is the md2pdf client application. It is intended to
be used with an md2pdf-webserver
instance, running locally or remotely.
See the md2pdf-webserver hompage for more information
Usage is quite simple, run md2pdf-client -h
for more information:
usage: md2pdf_client.py [-h] [--set-default OPTION VALUE] [-s ADDRESS[:PORT]]
[--proto {http,https}] [-t TEMPLATE]
[FILEPATH]
md2pdf client - connect to an md2pdf server and create a PDF file
positional arguments:
FILEPATH Input Markdown file to be converted
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--set-default OPTION VALUE
Change a default value for an option. Use the full
argument name, separated by a space, e.g.: '--set-
default proto https' or '--set-default server
192.168.1.1:9090'
-s ADDRESS[:PORT], --server ADDRESS[:PORT]
Server address to request PDF generation from. Use
hostname or IP address, and port number if required
(i.e. '127.0.0.1:9090', or 'my-host.com:8888'). If
port is not specified, port 80 will be used
--proto {http,https} Protocol to use
-t TEMPLATE, --template TEMPLATE
Template to use, instead of the server default
(include the file extension)
- Don't forget to set a default port when you set the default server! You probably won't be using port 80, so make sure you set it correctly, with something like
md2pdf-client --set-default server 1.2.3.4:9090
ormd2pdf-client --set-default server hostname.tld:9090
. Don't include the protocol here. md2pdf-webserver
by default doesn't do HTTPS - but it would be possible to put it behind a HTTPS reverse proxy. If that is the case, don't forget to set the default protocol withmd2pdf-client --set-default proto https
- If you use the
--template
option, don't forget that the template must also exist in the server - you can't use a local template (at least not yet). - If something doesn't work on the server end, you should get a
.log
file in the same directory as your input Markdown file - take a look in there for more information. - If something doesn't work on the client end, it can be helpful to run
md2pdf-client
from the command line to check the output.
md2pdf-client
is available as an Ubuntu Snap package. You can install it with :
$ sudo snap install md2pdf-client
The packaging is done automatically by Launchpad, based on the Snapcraft config in this repo.
It can also be run as a Python script:
python3 md2pdf_client.py -f <file>
This project is released under the terms of the GNU Affero GPL version 3 (or later). Please see LICENSE for details.
The base of my (very crappy) icon is from the standard GNOME icons. These are GPL licensed.