It feels like it has become a bit trickier to do so, but pandoc should do most of the work, here. For example, on a Debian-like system for installation commands:

sudo apt install pandoc
pandoc --from=markdown --to=pdf in.md --output out.pdf

You probably don't need to specify the file types, but it seems better to get in the habit of over-specifying things.

I say that it'll do "most of the work," because pandoc actually farms out the final PDF conversion by producing an intermediate step, LaTeX by default. My machine, for example, doesn't have the LaTeX engine that it expects and I couldn't figure out what to install quickly enough for this response, so I needed to find an alternative and specify it, settling on weasyprint, which takes its side-trip through HTML instead of LaTeX.

sudo apt install weasyprint
pandoc --from=markdown --to=pdf in.md --output out.pdf --pdf-engine=weasyprint

This does preserve the emoji, which comes as a pleasant surprise to me, too.

In any case, this gets you a fairly boring PDF, looking a lot like a web page, which might do the trick. From there, though, you can go in more sophisticated directions. If, for example, you install texlive-latex-base, that will (should?) serve as the default LaTeX-to-PDF converter. You don't want to start there, because you'll need to configure all the LaTeX templates and stylesheets to get a valid conversion, which becomes an annoying tradeoff of how much effort you want to put in versus how much you want to change the look of the PDF.

I haven't seen any GUI interfaces that save you from the command-line, but they must exist, even if they only issue the pandoc command on selected files.

posted 1 day ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

John C‭

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