nwtgck / mdpdf

Markdown to PDF command line app with support for stylesheets

MDPDF - Markdown to PDF converter

A command line markdown to pdf converter with support for page headers, footers, and custom stylesheets. Mdpdf is incredibly configurable and has a JavaScript API for more extravogant usage.

For examples of how to use headers and footers, see the examples directory.

If you're using the Atom text editor, checkout the markdown-pdf plugin which uses mdpdf.

Installation

Install globally to use from the command line.

npm install mdpdf -g

Install locally to access the API.

npm install mdpdf --save

Example usage

• mdpdf README.md - Simple convert using GitHub Markdown CSS and some additional basic stylings.
• mdpdf README.md --style styles.css --header header.hbs --hHeight 22 - Convert with custom styling with a header of height 22mm.

Options

• --style=<filename> - A single css stylesheet you wish to apply to the PDF
• --header=<filename> - A HTML (.html) file to inject into the header of the PDF
• --h-height=<height> - The height of the header section
• --footer=<filename> - A HTML (.html) file to inject into the footer of the PDF
• --f-height=<height> - The height of the footer section
• --border=<size> - Border (top, left, bottom, right; default: 20mm)
• --border-top=<size> - Top border (default: 20mm)
• --border-left=<size> - Left border (default: 20mm)
• --border-bottom=<size> - Bottom border (default: 20mm)
• --border-right=<size> - Right border (default: 20mm)
• --no-emoji - Disables emoji conversions
• --debug - Save the generated html for debugging
• --help - Display this menu
• --version - Display the application version

Length parameters (<height> and <size>) require a unit. Valid units are mm, cm, in and px.

Emoji Support

In text emoji's are also supported, but there are a few instances of shorthand which do not work and require the longhand version, i.e. :+1: doesn't work but :thumbsup: will.

Programatic API

The API is very straight forward with a single function convert() which takes some options. The convert method uses a promise generated by the Bluebird.js library. For a full example see the bin/index.js!

Example API Usage

const mdpdf = require('mdpdf');

let options = {
    source: path.join(__dirname, 'README.md'),
    destination: path.join(__dirname, 'output.pdf'),
    styles: path.join(__dirname, 'md-styles.css'),
    pdf: {
        format: 'A4'
    }
};

mdpdf.convert(options).then((pdfPath) => {
    console.log('PDF Path:', pdfPath);
}).catch((err) => {
    console.error(err);
});

Options

• source (required) - Full path to the source markdown file.
• destination (required) - Full path to the destination (pdf) file.
• styles - Full path to a single css stylesheet which is applied last to the PDF.
• ghStyle - Boolean value of whether or not to use the GitHub Markdown CSS, defaults to false.
• defaultStyle - Boolean value of whether or not to use the additional default styles. These styles provide some things like a basic border and font size. Defaults to false.
• header - Full path to a the Handlebars (.hbs) file which will be your header. If you set this, you must set the header height (see below).
• debug - When this is set the intermediate HTML will be saved into a file, the value of this field should be the full path to the destination HTML.
• pdf (required) - An object which contains some sub parameters to control the final PDF document
  • format (required) - Final document format, allowed values are "A3, A4, A5, Legal, Letter, Tabloid"
  • header - A sub object which contains some header settings
    • height - Height of the documents header in mm (default 45mm). If you wish to use a header, then this must be set.
  • border - The document borders