jbeurel / mdpdf

Markdown to PDF command line app with support for stylesheets

MDPDF - Markdown to PDF converter

This is a command line markdown to pdf converter with support for page headers and footers. It's designed to be very configurable and take a custom stylesheet. Bundle the stylesheet and package with your project and let anyone generate the same PDF of your document.

Installation

Install globally to use from the command line.

npm install mdpdf -g

Install locally to access the API.

npm install mdpdf --save

Example usage

• mdpdf README.md - Simple convert using GitHub Markdown CSS and some additional basic stylings.
• mdpdf README.md --style styles.css --header header.hbs --hHeight 22 - Convert with custom styling with a header of height 22mm.

Options

• --style A single css stylesheet you wish to apply to the PDF
• --header A handlebars (.hbs) file to inject into the header of the PDF
• --hHeight The height of the header section in mm, this might take some fiddling to get just right
• --debug Mdpdf converts the markdown into html before making a pdf, this saves out the html as well as the pdf
• --help Display the help menu

Emoji Support

In text emoji's are also supported, but there are a few instances of shorthand which do not work and require the longhand version, i.e. :+1: doesn't work but :thumbsup: will.

Programatic API

The API is very straight forward with a single function convert() which takes some options. The convert method uses a promise generated by the Bluebird.js library. For a full example see the bin/index.js!

Example API Usage

const mdpdf = require('mdpdf');

let options = {
    source: path.join(__dirname, 'README.md'),
    destination: path.join(__dirname, 'output.pdf'),
    styles: path.join(__dirname, 'md-styles.css'),
    pdf: {
        format: 'A4'
    }
};

mdpdf.convert(options).then((pdfPath) => {
    console.log('PDF Path:', pdfPath);
}).catch((err) => {
    console.error(err);
});

Options

• source - required, a full path to the source markdown file.
• desintation - required, a full path to the destination (pdf) file.
• styles - A full path to a single css stylesheet which is applied last to the PDF.
• ghStyle - A boolean value of whether or not to use the GitHub Markdown CSS, set to false to turn this stylesheet off.
• defaultStyle - A boolean value of whether or not to use the additional default styles. These styles provide some things like a basic border and font size. Set to false to turn stylesheet off.
• header - A full path to a the Handlebars (.hbs) file which will be your header. If you set this, you must set the header height (see below).
• debug - When this is set the intermediate HTML will be saved into a file, the value of this field should be the full path to the destination HTML.
• pdf - required An object which contains some sub parameters to control the final PDF document
  • format - required Final document format, allowed values are "A3, A4, A5, Legal, Letter, Tabloid"
  • header - A sub object which contains some header settings
    • height - Height of the documents header in mm (default 45mm). If you wish to use a header, then this must be set.
  • border - The document borders