I’ve found myself needing to make a PDF report from something written in Markdown. Obsidian’s built-in PDF Export and Better PDF Export both work fine, but they lack the flexibility - particularly in making a table of contents with page numbers.

After some research, I’ve come across a theme for Pandoc called Eisvogel, which allows you to export pretty documents from Markdown files.

Installation

Install Pandoc via their instructions. You’ll also need to install TeX Live for generating PDF documents too - on Debian/Ubuntu this is sudo apt install texlive.

Then, copy the eisvogel.tex from Eisvogel’s latest release to ~/.pandoc/templates/eisvogel.latex in your home folder.

Frontmatter

In order to use all of the features, you need to add some stuff to your frontmatter:

---
title: Document Title
subtitle: Subtitle
author: You
lang: en
titlepage: true
toc-own-page: true
---

This one specifies to add a title page, and to add a page break after the table of contents. More documentation on frontmatter options here.

The Command

pandoc -f gfm -t pdf --template eisvogel --listings --toc=true -o output.pdf input.md

This generates an output.pdf file from the input.md, which is a GitHub Flavored Markdown file (hence -f gfm). Listings and a table of contents are enabled, and we’re using the Eisvogel template.

Here’s what it looks like:

Change the Font

You can change the font to any installed on your system by using the xelatex engine instead of the standard pdftex one. Install it with sudo apt install texlive-xetex, then run the following to generate the file:

pandoc -f gfm -t pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex --template eisvogel --listings --toc=true -o output.pdf input.md

[!TIP] You may need to remove the lang attribute from your frontmatter because there seems to be a bug with it.

However, after this you can then set the mainfont property to any font on your system:

---
title: Document Title
subtitle: Subtitle
author: You
titlepage: true
toc-own-page: true
mainfont: "Inter"
---

Add a Title Page

Place a file named background.pdf in the same directory. If you’re stuck for a background, try this example.

Then, just add this to your frontmatter:

---
...
titlepage: true
titlepage-text-color: FFFFFF
titlepage-rule-color: "360049"
titlepage-rule-height: 0
titlepage-background: "background.pdf"
---