Something I've repeatedly run into lately is trying to convert markdown documents to PDF formats.

This is a bit of a strange process because markdown for the most part is just a shorthand for web markup. This means that to render these documents you need a web browser or some sort of web rendering engine. To actually control the output and make it more suitable for printing there's some more steps involved.

Here's a quick way to get this to happen using Linux or wsl:

sudo apt install pandoc texlive texlive-xetex texlive-full

Note that the texlive-full is a large download (bigger than 5GB as of the time of writing).

Then there's a template that's useful for pandoc conversions:

https://github.com/Wandmalfarbe/pandoc-latex-template

You have to download these and install them into the pandoc templates folder.

Then to run this to convert a basic markdown document into a pdf:

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --from markdown --template eisvogel

To get use of all the features provided by this template you may need to add metadata to the top of the markdown files like so:

---
title: "My document title"
author: [Example Author, Another Author]
date: "2025-04-13"
keywords: [Markdown, pdf, pandoc, document-conversion-pipelines]
---

The document contents are here...

If the markdown document has code samples you wish to have syntax highlighting applied to you can use the --listings option when converting:

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --from markdown --template eisvogel --listings

While somewhat basic this workflow allows you to translate a markdown document to a pdf file without having to go the web rendering route.