Pandoc is such a great application. It basically handles conversion of a whole bunch of file formats into other formats. It comes with a script called markdown2pdf that will automatically convert a markdown text file into a PDF file, complete with index, etc. It’s good stuff.

Anyway, I’m in the process of moving over to Ubuntu from my Macbook Pro, and it wasn’t very apparent what i needed to install in order to make this work. Even Google didn’t tell me what I needed to know, so I had to wing it. After some trial and error and just installing stuff, I figured out the combination.

sudo apt-get install pandoc texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-extra

That last one is a doozy. The doc package is almost 200 megs of .deb loveliness.

Then just invoke:

markdown2pdf somemarkdown.txt

Out comes a beautiful somemarkdown.pdf for you to send to all your friends, and they’ll be none the wiser that you write all your documents in a weird markup language.

Enjoy!