Markdown PDF

Use .md files as source files to produce simple PDF files. Similar to (La)Tex, this allows to have plain text source files and generate PDF from it. Ingredients:

• Visual Studio Code (incl. vscode-pdf plugin and perhaps mermaid-plugin if you use mermaid)

• remark and its plugins:

  npm install -g remark remark-cli remark-html remark-highlight.js remark-toc mermaid.cli remark-mermaid

  Delete from the command / omit if you don't need:

  • highligh.js Code Syntax Highlighting
  • toc Table of Contents (very little configuration possibilities)
  • mermaid "Write graphs" in markdown.

• weasyprint to convert .html to .pdf; When installing python on windows make sure to install python 64bit version if you have a 64bit machine

Size on disk: ~350MB - 550MB (see Installation Size). As compared to 1.5GB of Latex (with Editor). Use this project as a template.

Result

Visual Studio Code: Live Markdown Preview:

Visual Studio Code: PDF Preview (using vscode-pdf plugin):

Installation Size

Software	Size
Visual Studio Code	220MB
vscode-pdf plugin	3MB
Node/npm (markdown-it)	40MB (~100kb)
weasyprint	~100MB - 250MB (incl. python3 and GTK3+; larger on Windows)

Issues / Limitations

• Check out windows-specific branch when using powershell (on Windows)

• When using a font family on pre-tag weasprint/pango fails to handle empty lines. As a workaround we only use a single font for pre-tags. Adjust the css according to your font available. (see #415)

• Not all SVG's are printed correctly ('NoneType' object has no attribute 'get').

• weasyprint does not support MathML, but packages like MathJAX would be able to convert Tex, AsciiMath, and MathML to SVG - unfortunately not remark plugin on that end.