Difference between revisions of "Convert text documents with Pandoc"

Latest revision as of 21:06, 2 November 2021

Pandoc is a "universal document converter" which converts from one markup language to another. Here are some basic recipes for converting documents.

You can find instructions for installation on the Pandoc website for your particular operating system. Once you have pandoc installed, open a terminal session to use its command line interface.

More extensive documentation is available in the official Pandoc manual or through the command line by typing

man pandoc

Common pandoc arguments

-f or --from Option which is followed by the input format;

-t or --to Option which is followed by the output format;

-o or --output Option for file output

For example, using this command tells pandoc to use the file example.md, change it from markdown to html, with the output file to be named example.html:

pandoc example.md -f markdown -t html -o example.html

This will save a new version of the file example.html, in html in the same directory the command is run from.

Converting plain text Markdown

Files in Markdown can be saved in either .txt or .md formats. Both are plain text formats.

.md to .mediawiki

To convert files from Markdown to Mediawiki syntax (the same syntax this wiki uses):

pandoc -w mediawiki filename.md -o filename.wiki

.md to .pdf

You can easily convert these pages into PDFs with flowing text, using a pdf engine.

For this, you need to have an up-to-date version of BasicTeX installed. On Mac, first install with homebrew:

brew install BasicTex

This may take a while, and after installing BasicTex, you should close the terminal session and then begin a new one. Once you are in a directory that contains a plain text you want to convert (e.g. MANUAL.txt or example.md), you can run commands to convert these into PDF using the pdf engine xelatex.

pandoc MANUAL.md --pdf-engine=xelatex -o example13.pdf

pandoc MANUAL.txt --pdf-engine=xelatex -o example13.pdf

Convert HTML files

Example 1: Convert an HTML string to Markdown

Enter a string of HTML and pipe it to pandoc:

echo "<h1>Hello Pandoc</h1><p>from html to markdown</p>" | pandoc -f html -t markdown

Example 2: Convert a MediaWiki file to HTML

Save the content of a wiki page on to a plain-text file, example: page.wiki
Convert:

pandoc page.wiki -f mediawiki -t html -o page.html

@@ Line 23: / Line 23: @@
 This will save a new version of the file <code>example.html</code>, in html in the same directory the command is run from.
-== Plain text Markdown ==
+== Converting plain text Markdown ==
-Files in markdown can be saved in either <code>.txt</code> or <code>.md</code> formats. Both are [[plain text]] formats.
+Files in Markdown can be saved in either <code>.txt</code> or <code>.md</code> formats. Both are [[plain text]] formats.
-=== .md to .mediawiki ==
+=== .md to .mediawiki ===
-To convert files from markdown to mediawiki syntax (the same syntax this wiki uses):
+To convert files from Markdown to Mediawiki syntax (the same syntax this wiki uses):
-pandoc -w mediawiki filename.md -o filename.wiki
+<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">pandoc -w mediawiki filename.md -o filename.wiki</syntaxhighlight>
 === .md to .pdf ===
@@ Line 39: / Line 39: @@
 This may take a while, and after installing BasicTex, you should close the terminal session and then begin a new one. Once you are in a directory that contains a [[Plain text|plain text]] you want to convert (e.g. MANUAL.txt or example.md), you can run commands to convert these into PDF using the pdf engine <code>xelatex</code>.
-=== Using a .md file ===
 <syntaxhighlight lang="bash">pandoc MANUAL.md --pdf-engine=xelatex -o example13.pdf</syntaxhighlight>
-=== Using a .txt file ===
 <syntaxhighlight lang="bash">pandoc MANUAL.txt --pdf-engine=xelatex -o example13.pdf</syntaxhighlight>