Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)?

I worked on a 500+ page book[1] in Pandoc that included a bunch of code samples, math, a table of contents with working links and an index. (In hindsight, I wish we had thought about the index from the beginning rather than adding it after the fact.)

What worked well for me: Pandoc with a custom LaTeX template, and a decent amount of inline LaTeX to handle edge cases. We had a LaTeX theme to use from our publisher, but we also needed our own totally separate theme for the free version version of the book.

For one-off things like really long code lines, I found it best to manually figure out how to handle them. Sometimes there was a bit of TeX magic but, more often, I just rewrote or reorganized the code. I see the presentation and structure of code and math snippets as an integral part of how I'm communicating the underlying ideas, so manually changing things around to read better was fundamentally no different from going back and editing prose.

Unfortunately, this also means that the process was relatively hands-on. If you need something ≈completed automated, I expect Pandoc → LaTeX is going to fall a bit short. Edge cases need manual intervention, and it's easy for formatting errors to sneak in—the free version of our book has some formatting mistakes like code bleeding into the margin because I ran out of energy to fix all of them!

[1]: https://github.com/TikhonJelvis/RL-book

Have you explored the AST (abstract syntax tree) tools yet, like Mdast and the related remark and micromark?

https://github.com/syntax-tree/mdast-util-from-markdown

It might work better if you parse it into an intermediary Mdast format first, do whatever processing you need to implement "pages" (not a part of any Markdown dialect I'm familiar with?" but it shouldn't be hard to write a custom parser for that in Mdast), output that to HTML (via https://github.com/syntax-tree/mdast-util-to-hast) and THEN convert the HTML to PDF.

The AST tools basically give you structured JSON that's much easier to work with programmatically than raw Markdown. Then you can render that semantic JSON into HTML or other outputs.

It may be worthwhile to take a deeper look at Pandoc if other replies don’t respond with something easier.

In a recent Talk Python to Me podcast [0], the Quarto [1] developers talked about how they are using Pandoc’s Lua interpreter [2] to perform transformations that aren’t part of vanilla pandoc in.md -o out.pdf.

0. https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/493/quarto-open-source-t...

1. https://quarto.org/

2. https://pandoc.org/custom-writers.html

I think Pandoc and Calibre could work for you.

I've worked on PAIP, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, and I might be able to help you a bit. It's around 1k pages long. I used Pandoc to generate an epub file, and then Calibre to turn that into a PDF file. I just tried using Pandoc to generate the PDF file directly, and it/LaTeX choked on some Unicode characters.

For internal ebook links, there's a Lua script. You'll have to keep anchors unique across the book for this:

* good: "chapter1#section1_1" and "chapter2#section2_1"

* bad: a "chapter1#section1" and a "chapter2#section1"

WIP: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/pull/195

For line wrapping of code, there's CSS. I first used it over on "Writing an Operating System in 1,000 Lines"; here's the PR: https://github.com/nuta/operating-system-in-1000-lines/pull/...

I think you're overcomplicating it. I assume you created this markdown file and I assume you have a preview render that shows it the way you like it to be shown. So just hit the print button, and in the print dialog select save as PDF.

> I have a very long regular expression (email validation of course)

On a tangentially related note, I guarantee you that your regex is wrong. There is only one way to validate an email address:

Send an email to it and have them respond. Otherwise you will block some valid users.

Now of course you can make a regex that gets most email addresses, and if you're ok with that, then that's fine. But if you don't want to accidentally exclude someone, then sending email is the only way to validate it.

It's not marketed as a markdown-to-pdf tool, but I've found that Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) does an excellent job. Just create a new "vault", paste your markdown into a new note, and export to PDF.

Typora is the best I've used. It's a GUI, but it's pretty fantastic for a GUI Markdown editor (especially an Electron one), and its PDF export is consistent and customizable with styles. Includes a few good ones out of the box. Plus an automated TOC.

Hi, thanks for all the suggestions, Typst ultimately worked best, as I was generating my Markdown file with a script I could modify it to generate a Typst file and all of the links and highlighting worked beautifully.

IMHO electron based markdown editors are generally slow, bloated, short-lived, and often platform-limited.

Use this and add sed lines for any required non-breakyness per normal CSS, rules can be specific to @media print as required.

  $ cat ~/bin/mdview 
  #!/bin/bash
  # markdown viewer
  tmpfile=.mdview.tmp-`uuidgen`.html
  # start html
  echo "" >${tmpfile}
  # duplicate markdown for modification
  cp ${1} ${1}.mdtmp
  # add extra newline after trailing :
  sed -i -e 's/: \*$/:\r\r\n\n/' ${1}.mdtmp
  # generate HTML from markdown
  #  note the --html-no-skiphtml --html-no-escapehtml allows the preservation
  #  of  anchors within text to allow [link][#anchorname]
  lowdown --html-no-skiphtml --html-no-escapehtml -thtml ${1}.mdtmp >>${tmpfile}
  # remove the temporary markdown file
  rm ${1}.mdtmp
  # add newline before images
  sed -i -e 's/