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Pandoc: A Markdown publishing tool workflow

  • To be completed by Oct 29
    • Workflow
      • example commands
    • Markdown resources/tutorial

Pandoc: A Markdown Publishing Tool and Workflow

This site will describe and demonstrate the workflow of creating content using Markdown to edit documents and the software tool Pandoc to produce various publication file formats which are used by the University Libraries when creating Open Educational Resources.

Markdown

Created in 2004, Markdown is a simple markup language, that was originally created to help maintain documents needing formatting that is easy to use and implement. Markdown allows for one to write a single plain text document and have that document’s content be accessible in a variety of document formats. These formats are defined with the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The various CSS files define HTML styles that include such items as formatting, fonts, header. All a part of helping to determine how a final document looks for a particular file type.

Pandoc

Pandoc is a tool that runs from the command window or Linux shell to convert a markdown file to another file format. For this workflow, with the use of an appropriate CSS is available to help convert HTML, PDF, DOCX, and EPUB. You can also use your own or discovered CSS as well.

Pandoc can be installed on most major operating systems. MS Windows has both an installer and zip file collection of the binaries. MacOS requires the installation of Homebrew. Linux systems install using the package manager that comes with your particular installation of Linux. Pandoc converts to the PDF format using to LaTeX which would include additional installations.

Workflows

A typical work flow is an author working on a text to be used in the classroom. It is made up of chapters, tables, figures and can typically look like Single Markdown File:

whole_book.md

A Few Markdown Files and a stylesheet:

book.zip/
├───chapter1.md
├───chapter2.md
├───chapter3.md
├───stylesheet.css

Multiple Markdown Files, Images, and a Stylesheet:

book.zip/
├───chapter1.md
├───chapter2.md
├───chapter3.md
├───chapter4.md
├───stylesheet.css
├───images/
│   ├───image1.jpg
│   └───image2.jpg
│   └───image3.jpg
…

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