Using pandoc

pandoc is a “universal document converter”. If you ever have a bunch of documents in one format (like .html) that you want to convert to another (like .pdf), you can use Pandoc for it!

Installation

Pandoc isn’t installed by default (usually). You can install it by following the instructions from its installation webpage.

Basic Usage

We can ask pandoc to convert an input file format into an output file format. It’ll normally figure out what to do automatically.

pandoc input.txt -o output.docx

HTML Files

One really useful use-case for pandoc is converting files to HTML for use on a website. We can do this the normal way:

pandoc input.txt -o output.html

However, this won’t work correctly in a web browser! By default, pandoc creates an HTML fragment, a piece of an HTML file which can be embedded in a bigger file. To create an HTML file that “stands alone”, we have to give it the --standalone flag:

pandoc input.txt --standalone -o output.html

Pandoc might also warn you that the document needs a title. This can be specified directly in some input formats (using what’s called “frontmatter”, extra metadata which isn’t part of the file itself), or it can be specified on the command line using --metadata title="...".

More Info

The Pandoc demo page has a ton of examples.