How to convert Markdown + CSS -> PDF?

Question

I'm trying to convert a Markdown file into a PDF. I'm looking for only two things:

• A way to easily change the style of the pdf (for example with a CSS file)
• A syntax highlighter for code blocks

What tools can I use for that? I tried Pandoc, but it uses Latex for the formatting which is not easy to use.

Answer 1

Pandoc can convert your Markdown to HTML, but the styling/layout is a different topic. If you want to produce a PDF but use CSS for styling, you need something that can interpret CSS. That is either use a browser and print to PDF, pay for Prince or try wkhtmltopdf. Btw, pandoc can also use wkhtmltopdf now:

pandoc -t html5 --css mystyles.css input.md -o output.pdf

But I suspect if you want a beautifully-typeset PDF for free you'll have to learn LaTeX or ConTeXt which is a modern and more self-contained replacement for LaTeX, both can be used with pandoc. See creating a PDF with pandoc.

You can also give PanWriter a try: a markdown editor I built, where you can inject CSS and export the PDF from the paginated preview.

Answer 2

There is really nice and simple tool for browsing Markdown documents which additionally supports export to PDF features:

GFMS - Github Flavored Markdown Server

It's simple and lightweight (no configuration needed) HTTP server you can start in any directory containing markdown files to browse them.

Features:

• full GFM Markdown support
• source code syntax highlighting
• browsing files and directories
• nice looking output (and configurable CSS style sheets)
• export to PDF (best-looking markdown-to-pdf output I've ever seen)

gfms -p 8888

wget "http://localhost:8888/file.md?pdf" -O file.pdf

Answer 3

To a certain extent, I'd suggest just learning the basic latex formatting you need - it removes a layer of interpretation by the renderer.

However, pandoc does support html input, so in theory, you could export markdown->html(with custom css), then call pandoc again to convert to html. I don't know if (or how much) of the formatting would be saved - css can be really complicated to parse.