mkpdf

This is a simple command line wrapper around pandoc and latexmk written in shell script and tested with both bash and dash, so it should hopefully be POSIX-compliant. It will generate pdf output from one or more files written in pandoc's markdown using a specified template.

Installing

Arch Linux

There is a package in the AUR, so use something like pacaur -S mkpdf

Debian

Run make deb to create a package for debian. Or just download an already-built package from the releases page. To build the debian package, the following additional dependencies need to be satisfied:

• dpkg
• fakeroot

Ubuntu or Linux Mint

Preliminary testing suggests the Debian package will also work on these two Debian-based distributions. Please feel free to contact me if you encounter any problems.

Manual Installation

Add the following files to your PATH and make sure they are executable:

• mkpdf
• furbishtex (optional postprocessor)
  • If furbishtex is found in your PATH and executable, it will be called before running latexmk. See furbishtex -h for further explanation.
  • for furbishtex to do something you will also want to move default.sed to /usr/share/furbishtex or at least to $HOME/.furbishtex for a user-specific installation

A manpage (mkpdf.1.gz) can be generated from docs.md using make man. This file usually has to be moved to /usr/share/man/man1 to make it globally available.

Install instructions are also contained in the makefile, so you can also run sudo make install to set everything up.

Dependencies

The main dependencies are:

• pandoc
• latexmk
• texlive (or probably even some other latex distribution)
• biber (if any bibliography is to be resolved)

Also some basic command line utils are used, but these should be included in every GNU/Linux system by default. Please drop me a message, if this is not the case.

Automated Language Detection

Mkpdf can make use of the python langdetect library to automatically detect the language used in a document -- which is done in case lang is neither specified via metadata nor via the command line. This information is then used for hyphenation, citations etc. To use this feature, make sure python 3.x is installed and python3 is executable and in your PATH. You will also have to install langdetect -- e. g. via pip or pip3 (running pip install --user langdetect). If either python3 or langdetect are missing, mkpdf will simply skip language detection.

Usage (v0.3.1)

Usage: mkpdf [options] <directory>
   Or: mkpdf [options] <files>

Options:
  -c  --clean           Remove temporary files before running
                        latexmk
  -d  --debug           Do not hide latexmk's output
  -o  --output          Specify a name for the output file
  -p  --preview         Open pdf once generated
  -t  --template        Specify a template to use with pandoc
  -h  --help            Print this help message and exit

Pandoc-Options:
  -M  --metadata        These options will be passed on to pandoc.
                        Please refer to pandoc's documentation for
                        further information on what they do.

Specifying templates:
    If no template is set from the command line, mkpdf will check
    metadata from input files for a field named 'template' and use
    it's value as the template name. If multiple templates are
    specified, any but the first one will be ignored.

Further information can be found in docs.md, which can also be used to generate a manpage.

Known Issues

• Long options will only work if the gnu version of getopt is available on the system. Otherwise only short options will be supported.