Two Birds, One Stone

I use markdown files a lot more than I ever have for documentation. I know, it’s probably not the sexiest thing these days, but it’s how I sharpened my skills over the past five years. Between learning more modern .NET coding paradigms, Git from the command line (and only the command line), and, yes, writing docs in straight-up markdown – mainly because I like it.

Being an Ubuntu-only user for nearly 10 years (and before that Fedora Core), I avoid buying new computers. I’m cheap and make do with what I have until it breaks. The following solution, plus a whole lot of dependencies for Ubuntu 22.04 for Pdflatex, was really nice for creating human readable PDF docs for a system I am building right now. From markdown files stored in my code repository.

The thing here? Being efficient with client hours and delivering not just one form of documentation for both system architecture & code, but two, that humans can read.

Convert Markdown to PDF

You can convert markdown files to PDF using online converters or command-line tools. While I looked at VS Code first, I opted for a more command line way of doing this on my development rig.

? Pandoc: A powerful command-line tool for converting markdown to various formats, including PDF.

– Install Pandoc and a LaTeX distribution (e.g., TeX Live).

– Run the command: pandoc infile.md -o outfile.pdf

? Markdown to PDF Online Converters: There are several online tools that can convert markdown files to PDF.

– Websites like Dillinger or StackEdit also allow you to import markdown files and export them as PDF.