How Can I Convert Github-Flavored Markdown To A PDF

Question

I have recently started learning Markdown for use with documentation, and need to print out a few of my Markdown pages. I would like to use a command-line, Terminal, etc. utility that allows me to convert Github-flavored Markdown to PDF. It needs to have proper syntax highlighting and should not look horrible. Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I've had success using grip to display markdown in Chrome and then use Chrome's "Save as PDF" option in the Print dialog.

pip install grip  
grip your_markdown.md

grip will render the markdown on localhost:5000 - just edit away and refresh the browser. Print when ready.

This gave a more reliable representation than pandoc and was lighter weight than installing latex (required by pandoc for pdf generation).

The print is not command line in this answer, but still found this easier/more reliable (looked 100% like Github for a long document including relatively linked images and code highlighting).

Answer 2

You can also use Node.js based markdown-pdf

npm install -g markdown-pdf
markdown-pdf /path/to/markdown

Answer 3

Take a look at pandoc. It does have syntax highlighting. It might require you making (minor) changes to your document since it has its own flavour of markdown and I don't know how closely it matches the GitHub flavour.

Answer 4

If the markdown file was hosted on github repository, gitprint is an interesting option to create pdf / print.

All you need to do is to replace github.com by gitprint.com in the URL. Here is an example from gitprint's homepage.

Unfortunately, it does not work on markdown gists, and works only with markdown files at the repository.

Answer 5

There's an online converter available at http://www.markdowntopdf.com
This provides syntax highlighting out of the box and is the simplest solution I've seen so far. It also correctly handles other features specific to GFM e.g. tables.

Answer 6

For those with Linux, use pandoc.

Install:

sudo apt install pandoc texlive-latex-extra

Yes, you need -extra package because of fonts.

Convert:

pandoc --from markdown -o output.pdf my-file.md

Answer 7

As I stated in my comment, Github uses Linguist to provide syntax highlighting. On Github, you can use this to specify syntax highlighting like so:

```ruby
require 'redcarpet'
markdown = Redcarpet.new("Hello World!")
puts markdown.to_html
```

Unfortunately, there's no good way to convert Markdown directly to a PDF file with syntax highlighting.

Alternatives:

Vim:

If you have vim, you can easily achieve syntax highlighting by running the following from a terminal:

vim -c hardcopy -c quit /path/to/file.ps

Or inside of vim:

:hardcopy >/path/to/file.ps

This will produce a PostScript file that can be converted to pdf using, for example, ps2pdf:

ps2pdf /path/to/file.ps

Source-highlight:

If you'd like instead to go the route of HTML or LaTeX, you could try Source-highlight instead. A list of all languages supported by Source-highlight can be found here.

A few example Source-highlight commands include:

source-highlight -s java -f html -i Hello.java -o Hello1.html
source-highlight -s java -f html --input Hello.java --output Hello2.html --doc
source-highlight -s java -f html -i Hello.java -o Hello3.html --title "Happy Java with java2html :-)" --tab 3

Using this input file

And each outputting their own respective HTML file:

Hello1.html
Hello2.html
Hello3.html

Further examples of Source-highlight usage can be found here

Windows:

Vim, ps2pdf (provided by Ghostscript) and Source-highlight are all available via Cygwin.

Answer 8

I have recently created a service to convert markdown documents to PDF. It supports Github flavoured markdown as well as syntax highlighting. The service is located at: http://markdown2pdf.com

Answer 9

Mine solution: convert markdown with pandoc to html (don't forget to use css for pandoc to show table borders), then open it with libreoffice, choose an option export as pdf.

NB: neither of mentioned here and on the Internet solutions worked for me: 1) browser-based solutions (i.e. grip) are adding excess info, like page numbers, which I didn't manage to remove, 2) pandoc convertage to pdf is broken, for me it generates an empty table (perhaps because of unicode, and yes, I configured it to use xetex), 3) site based solutions (i.e. gitprint.com) are also adding redundant things, like github-like margins, whereas I need just a simple table I generated with awk!

Answer 10

I have tried several chrome plugins and online converters.
MDtr2PDF is the best one. It supports Github-flavoured-markdown and unicode.

Answer 11

I refined this snippet for my personal needs:

# sudo apt install grip wkhtmltopdf

MD=${1:-README.md}
PDF=${2:-"$MD".pdf}
PORT=8971
DELAY=10

printf "Converting $MD to $PDF on port $PORT\n"
printf "Waiting $DELAY seconds for server to start...\n"

grip "$MD" localhost:$PORT &
sleep $DELAY
wkhtmltopdf http://localhost:$PORT "$PDF"
kill $(ps -eo pid,command | grep grip | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}')

Save as /usr/local/bin/md2pdf and sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/md2pdf afterwards.

Usage:

• md2pdf converts README.md to README.md.pdf

• md2pdf foo.md converts foo.md to foo.md.pdf

• md2pdf foo.md bar.pdf converts foo.md to bar.pdf

Answer 12

I had the most luck with VSCode and the Markdown PDF extension. The online converters screwed up the encoding for my files or inserted watermarks in the header.

Usage:

1. Install the extension
2. Open your MD file with VSCode, make sure Markdown highlighting is enabled
3. Open the command palette (F1), type export and select markdown-pdf: Export (pdf)

NB: The extension installs and uses a local version of Chromium in the background.

There are several options to control formatting, they are all explained on the website linked above