Markdown Exploder

A Markdown → LaTeX + HTML Workflow

Use Case

I love markdown for it's simplicity and lack of distractions. Over the years, it has become a stronghold for me to fall back to when I feel like I'm overwhelmed or distracted. When it came time to draft out the first version of my capstone thesis, I retreated all the way into a vim introduction.md as a way to shut out everything except for my work. Except there was 1 problem, I needed to convert 8 different markdown files into a single LaTeX report. Because automating annoying tasks in 99% of the reason I got into computer science, enter...Markdown Exploder.

Markdown Exploder is a simple workflow enabled by python, pandoc, and LaTex. Sections are written in markdown, organized with a single sequence.txt file, and then compiled into a static html page and LaTeX report.

You can see a working version (with a very sparse paper) at https://capstone.sethangell.com!

Ideal Workflow

1. Create a LaTeX document which provides a basic structure for my document and expects a collection of files using the \input directive.
2. Create an HTML homepage template which expects a block of HTML content and some navigation tags, representing my paper.
3. Write a bunch of markdown in a directory organized as a collection of high level sections of my Capstone Proposal (Introduction, Methodology, etc)
4. Run a command which…
   1. converts the individual markdown files into their equivalent LaTeX form
   2. compiles all of the markdown file into a single file
   3. generates a LaTeX PDF based off of the structure mentioned before
   4. generates an html block from the single markdown file and places it inside of the larger html file
   5. generates a docker image which hosts all of this and makes it available with a nginx reverse proxy

Requirements

• Should require minimal fussiness after set up
• Should play nicely living in a git repository
• Should source images from a single folder. I create an assets folder, I place images into the assets folder, everyone is happy and knows to pull from the assets folder
• We should generate a compiled LaTeX PDF
• We should generate a valid HTML webpage

Tools For This Project

• Pandoc
• Docker
• LaTeX
• Nginx
• Python
• Jinja

MarkdownExploder Writing Workflow

Preprocessing Workflow