Re: Markdown to PDF

Subject: Re: Markdown to PDF
From: Mark Giffin <mgiffin -at- earthlink -dot- net>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2015 19:03:20 -0800

I'm fairly sure that you can use Sphinx with programming languages other than Python. Or even without a programming language. If you're interested in Sphinx I suggest you check this out.

Mark Giffin
Mark Giffin Consulting, Inc.
http://markgiffin.com/

On 2/19/2015 6:50 PM, Ryan Young wrote:

Sphinx sounds pretty great, Elisa. Your situation sounds similar to mine,
where you're working very closely with the developers. I don't work with
any Python guys (that I know of), but they'd probably like
ReStructuredText.

Thank you and everyone else on this thread for your suggestions. Much
appreciated.

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 11:00 AM, Elisa R. Sawyer <elisawyer -at- gmail -dot- com>
wrote:

Hi Ryan,

You've already gotten a few good suggestions, and I have one add to the
list.

Markdown is by design simple and therefore limited. LaTeX allows for
precise formatting, but it might be difficult to get your build to create
pdf's of the quality you want using Markdown. Moving toward Docbook is one
possibility, but there is another, somewhat more developer-friendly
solution--ReStructuredText using Sphinx, which can be considered a slightly
more grown-up version of Markdown:

You can find information on several Web sites:

http://sphinx-doc.org/contents.html
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
http://pedrokroger.net/using-sphinx-write-technical-books/

To get a pdf from Sphinx you need to install a pdflatex plugin. The
details of what you need vary with operating system.

I inherited a set of docs that were created using Sphinx and had to find
my way around the process of editing in .rst files and building both HTML
and pdf output. I'm using Sublime Text with several plugins, on a Mac with
OS X Yosemite. I'm still learning some of the finer points but think that
this has a lot of potential.

In my case, I discovered that I can get some developer input when I hit a
road block with a specific issue, which makes the process fun and
interesting. This happens because Sphinx is seen as a tool for python
developers. I don't think that it's any more difficult to tweak the build
for good pdf's from this setup than it is to tweak DITA-OT or Docbook.

-Elisa



On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 8:56 PM, Ryan Young <ryangyoung -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

Hello,

At my new job, what documentation there is is in Markdown. The engineers
set up a script using pandoc to create some functional PDF output. The
problem is that pandoc requires LaTex to produce the PDF, which doesn't
give me very much control of things like the location of images in the
document (or the ability to create links).

I've played around with Atom and SublimeText, but neither gives me all
that
much more control over the PDF output. I've also suggested the company
start using Confluence, which would solve the problem, but it seems like
that will take a bit of planning.

Any suggestions?
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--
Elisa Rood Sawyer
~~~~~^~~~~~
Technical and Creative Writer
"Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today." Mark Twain




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Follow-Ups:

References:
Markdown to PDF: From: Ryan Young
Re: Markdown to PDF: From: Elisa R. Sawyer
Re: Markdown to PDF: From: Ryan Young

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