Markdown to User Manual via pandoc

Web Output 🌐

.pdf Output 📄

💻🌙

📱🌙

💻☀

📱☀

This script generates an .html, .pdf, .odt, and .docx file for a user manual and/or technical documentation — all from a single markdown file (user-manual.md). The documents are generated with pandoc and standard POSIX/GNU core utilities.

This project was derived from another personal project of mine, pandoc-resume

Features

HTML Output

• Minimal footprint, styles.css only contain styles needed for responsive UX.
• Automatically generates a “table of contents” transformed into a modal menu bar with its subsections.

Document Output

• Extensive LaTeX template (template.tex) for a less “LaTeX-y”-looking document.
• Utilizes standard pandoc features to generate a .docx and .odt file

Dependencies 🔗

• pandoc
• LaTeX
• make
• POSIX-compatible environment

Installation Instructions for Dependencies ⬇️ 📦

macOS (with Homebrew and .pkg dependencies):

1. Install Homebrew if you haven’t already: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
2. Update Homebrew: brew update
3. Install the full MacTeX package
4. Install pandoc and recommended dependencies via Homebrew:
   • brew install pandoc
   • brew install imagemagick (for image conversion)
   • brew install librsvg (for SVG support)
   • brew install libxml2 (for XML support)
   • brew install make (for building and compiling)

note: on macOS, you may need to install xcode and the xcode command line tools before installing homebrew.

Ubuntu:

1. Update the package index: sudo apt update
2. Install pandoc and recommended dependencies:
   • sudo apt install pandoc
   • sudo apt install texlive-full (for LaTeX support)
   • sudo apt install imagemagick (for image conversion)
   • sudo apt install librsvg2-bin (for SVG support)
   • sudo apt install libxml2-utils (for XML support)
   • sudo apt install build-essential (includes make, for building and compiling)

Arch Linux:

1. Update the package index: sudo pacman -Syy
2. Install pandoc and recommended dependencies:
   • sudo pacman -S pandoc
   • sudo pacman -S texlive texlive-lang (for LaTeX support)
   • sudo pacman -S imagemagick (for image conversion)
   • sudo pacman -S librsvg (for SVG support)
   • sudo pacman -S libxml2 (for XML support)
   • sudo pacman -S base-devel (includes make, for building and compiling)

Windows

• Please refer to this official pandoc document for installation instructions: https://pandoc.org/installing.html#windows

Usage 🛠

• running make or make compile builds all the assets
• make clean deletes all the generated assets

Output ⚙

• The website output (HTML) of the script will be found in the public/ directory.
• All document output (PDF, Word, Open Document Format) will be found in the output/ directory.

Links 🌎

• Source Code (GitHub)