The base file written in markdown is sample.md.
The markdown file converted to plaintext used the command
pandoc -f markdown -t plain sample.md -s -o sample.txt
Resulted in the file sample.txt
The markdown file was converted to a *.man file, then to a file readable on a terminal using the commands.
pandoc -f markdown -t man sample.md -s -o sample.man
groff -mandoc -Thtml sample.man > sample-man.html
Which resulted in the man file sample.man which was processed with groff to produce the file sample-man.html.
If you have a linux system you can type the command
man groff
to see the man page for groff. Or the command
zless /usr/share/man/man1/groff.1.gz
to see the source file. This is typically how documentation is stored on unix or linux systems.
A document format used by Microsoft and some other system is RTF (Rich Text Format). I am not going to show you the raw RTF file since is is binary. But it was produced and viewable with the following commands.
pandoc -f markdown -t rtf sample.md -s -o sample.rtf
wordpad sample.rtf screen capture to sample-rtf.png
You can see a screen shot of what is looks like in the wordpad program wordpad sample.rtf
One format that is available from pandoc is used by Microsoft work is the docx format. I was able to produce and view it with the following commands
pandoc -f markdown -t docx sample.md -s -o sample.docx
Open in Libreoffice sample.docx export as PDF
The results can be exported by Libreoffice in pdf format that looks like sample.docx in PDF
The pandoc program converted the sample.md program to a *.tex file with the commands
pandoc -f markdown -t latex sample.md -s -o sample.tex
pdflatex sample.tex ; mv sample.pdf sample-tex.pdf
The LaTeX format document looks like sample.tex and after processing pdflatex sample.tex
Or the file can be directly converted to a PDF file using pandoc
pandoc -f markdown -t latex sample.md -s -o sample-md-latex.pdf
Which produced the file pandoc to latex to pdf
pandoc -f markdown -t html5 sample.md -s -o sample-md-html5.pdf
Which produced the file pandoc to html5 to pdf
One of the most common uses by me for pandoc is to convert markdown to html5 format. Now a simple conversion can be accmplished with
pandoc -f markdown -t html5 sample.md -s -o sample.html
Which produces a page as seen in a text editor as sample.html source code or in standard browser view as sample.html
You can see a simple html version of this sample page you could write directly at manual sample.html which produces a page like basic sample.html.
The XML format is used in Open Office and Microsoft Word for their DocX format. There is similiar type of XML document called Docbook which I have written in the past directly. Lets look at some conversion methods and the output files.
pandoc -f markdown -t opendocument sample.md -s -o sample-md.xml
Converts to XML as used in open office. The result looks like: Openoffice XML
pandoc -f markdown -t docbook5 sample.md -s -o sample-md.doc5
xsltproc -o $OUTPUT $OPTIONS $CSSSTYLE $HTMLSTYLE $SOURCE
where $OPTIONS=“–stringparam section.autolabel 1 –stringparam toc.section.depth 4” and $CSSSTYLE=“–stringparam html.stylesheet style-ob.css” and $HTMLSTYLE=/usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/docbook-xsl/html/docbook.xsl"
Written by John F. Moore
Last Revised: Tue 19 Apr 2022 09:45:47 PM EDT