Eisvogel

A clean pandoc LaTeX template to convert your markdown files to PDF or LaTeX. It is designed for lecture notes and exercises with a focus on computer science.

Preview

A custom title page	A basic example page

Installation

1. Install pandoc from http://pandoc.org/. You also need to install LaTeX.

2. Move the template eisvogel.tex to your pandoc templates folder and rename the file to eisvogel.latex.The location of the templates folder depends on your operating system:

   • Unix, Linux, macOS: ~/.pandoc/templates/
   • Windows XP: C:\Documents And Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\pandoc
   • Windows Vista or later: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\pandoc

   If there are no folders called templates or pandoc you need to create them and put the template eisvogel.latex inside.

Usage

1. Open the terminal and navigate to the folder where your markdown file is located.

2. Execute the following command

   pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --from markdown --template eisvogel --listings
   

   where example.md is the markdown file you want to convert to PDF.

In order to have nice headers and footers you need to supply metadata to your document. You can do that with a YAML metadata block at the top of your markdown document (see the example markdown file). Your markdown document may look like the following:

---
title: "The Document Title"
author: [Example Author, Another Author]
date: 2017-02-20
tags: [Markdown, Example]
...

Here is the actual document text...

Custom Template Variables

This template defines some new variables to control the appearance of the title page. The existing template variables from pandoc are all supported and their documentation can be found in the pandoc manual.

• titlepage default=false

  turns on the title page when true

• titlepage-color

  the background color of the title page. The color value must be given as an HTML hex color like D8DE2C without the leading number sign (#). When specifying the color in YAML, it is advisable to enclose it in quotes like so titlepage-color: "D8DE2C" to avoid the truncation of the color (e.g. 000000 becoming 0).

• titlepage-text-color default=5F5F5F

  the text color of the title page

• titlepage-rule-color default=435488

  the color of the rule on the top of the title page

• titlepage-rule-height default=4

  the height of the rule on the top of the title page (in points)

Examples

Numbered Sections

For PDFs with numbered sections use the --number-sections or -N option.

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --number-sections

Syntax Highlighting with Listings

You can get syntax highlighting of delimited code blocks by using the LaTeX package listings with the option --listings. This example will produce the same syntax highlighting as in the example PDF.

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --listings

Syntax Highlighting Without Listings

The following examples show syntax highlighting of delimited code blocks without using listings. To see a list of all the supported highlight styles, type pandoc --list-highlight-styles.

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --highlight-style pygments

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --highlight-style kate

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --highlight-style espresso

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --highlight-style tango

Standalone LaTeX Document

To produce a standalone LaTeX document for compiling with any LaTeX editor use .tex as an output file extension.

pandoc example.md -o example.tex --template eisvogel

Changing the Document Language

The default language of this template is American English. The lang variable identifies the main language of the document, using a code according to BCP 47 (e.g. en or en-GB). For an incomplete list of the supported language code see the documentation for the hyph-utf8 package (Section 2). The following example changes the language to British English:

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel -V lang=en-GB

The following example changes the language to German:

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel -V lang=de

Typesetting a Book

The template uses the default KOMA-Script class scrartcl as the document class because it has some advantages over the default article class. For typesetting a book I recommend the corresponding KOMA-Script class scrbook instead of the default book. You can manually replace the string scrartcl in the template with scrbook.

To get the correct chapter headings you need to tell pandoc that it should convert first level headings (indicated by one # in markdown) to chapters with the command line option --top-level-division=chapter.

There will be one blank page before each chapter because the template is two-sided per default. So if you plan to publish your book as a PDF and don't need a blank page you should add the class option onesided which can be done by supplying a template variable -V classoption=oneside.

Example Images

A green title page	Code blocks styled with listings

License

This project is open source licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License. Please see the LICENSE file for more information.