what is the simplest tool to convert markdown to pdf in commandline?
I have found howtos where people suggest to use pandoc, but the required packages need gigabytes of dependencies:
apt-get install pandoc texlive-latex-base texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-extra-utils texlive-latex-extra
is there some minimal tool that can convert simple markdown to pdf in commandline, that does not require tons of dependencies?
I am using Debian 10.
All of the methods presented here still use pandoc in some kind of way, as the gigabytes of downloads mentioned in the question come from the LaTeX (texlive-*) packages in the given apt-get command – none of these are required. The pandoc package itself has a download size of ~17MB, which may or may not be acceptable for your use-case.
If you really, really don't want to use pandoc, then you could use lunamark in its place. It's similar to pandoc (both tools share the same author) but lunamark is written in Lua, a very small and lean language with a small footprint. There is no Debian package available though, you'd have to build it yourself. But, as stated before, the main issue is PDF creation: all good PDF libraries must do font handling, which usually requires heavy libraries to be available.
I'm not aware of any tool that would go directly from Markdown to PDF, the usual way is to go to an intermediary format first. The choice of that format determines your options.
groff: GNU troff is an implementation of the troff text formatter. It's at the base of tools like man, is very fast, and can also produce nice looking PDF output. You'll need the groff and ghostscript packages, then call pandoc with
pandoc --pdf-engine=pdfroff --output=out.pdf ...
This is probably the solution that requires the fewest and smallest additional packages. Make sure though that apt-get won't install any unnecessary packages:
apt-get install pandoc groff ghostscript --no-install-recommends
On a freshly setup system this gives you
Need to get 38.3 MB of archives.
After this operation, 194 MB of additional disk space will be used.
HTML: There are multiple HTML-to-PDF converters, and pandoc can use two (with current versions three) of these engines to go handle the conversion from Markdown to PDF. You'll have the choice between weasyprint, which is written in Python, and wkhtmltopdf, which is built on top of the webkit HTML engine that was used in Chromium. Install either of these and then use
pandoc --pdf-engine=weasyprint
or
pandoc --pdf-engine=wkhtmltopdf
Especially wkhtmltopdf may be a good choice if you already have many graphic and font package installed anyway. E.g., on a system that has the LXDE desktop environment installed, you'd see:
% apt-get install pandoc wkhtmltopdf --no-install-recommends
... [omitted] ...
Need to get 16.4 MB of archives.
After this operation, 122 MB of additional disk space will be used.
However, the impact would be much more substantial on a completely fresh system:
Need to get 91.1 MB of archives.
After this operation, 530 MB of additional disk space will be used.
LaTeX with Docker: This method is really using LaTeX again, but instead of installing it on our system, we use a Docker image that contains pandoc and only the bare minimum of LaTeX packages, making it comparatively small. You'll need the docker.io package, then run this lengthy command:
docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)":/data -u $(id -u):$(id -g) pandoc/latex --output=out.pdf ...
The advantage of this is that you'll be using the latest pandoc and LaTeX versions, and it gives the nicest looking PDF (IMHO). However, the Docker image is still ~200MB in size, and Docker itself is also large (>90MB download size).
LibreOffice: This method only makes sense if you already have LibreOffice installed, as it is a very large dependency. In that case, pandoc can be used to convert to odt or docx, which then can be converted to PDF with
lowriter --headless --convert-to pdf intermediary.odt
I hope one of these suits your needs.
