Convert text documents with Pandoc
Pandoc is a "universal document converter" which converts from one markup language (e.g. HTML, Markdown 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;
-s or --standalone Option produces output with an appropriate header and footer;
-o or --output Option for file output
Convert plain text files (.txt) that are structured with Markdown to PDF
For this, you need to have an up-to-date version of BasicTeX installed. On Mac, first install with homebrew:
brew install BasicTex
Then, do:
pandoc MANUAL.txt --pdf-engine=xelatex -o example13.pdf
Convert downloaded wiki pages (plain text in the .wiki format) to 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