md2pdf simplifies the process of turning Markdown formatted text documents into print-ready PDF files without the need to go through an intermediate HTML phase. The command natively, and in pure Ruby, parses the Markdown document and uses Prawn to directly generate a correctly formatted PDF.
Prawn is the fastest pure Ruby PDF generation library available. It really is pretty cool and takes most of the ouch out of generating print-ready documents.
md2pdf is part of my markdown_prawn project and is released as a RubyGem.
You can install it using the following:
$ [sudo] gem install prawn --pre markdown_prawn --pre
An executable script md2pdf will be installed on your system’s path ready to be run.
It accepts no arguments, and instead expects a Markdown document to be passed to it on Standard In and it will render a PDF Document to Standard Out.
Example:
$ md2pdf < test.md > test.md.pdf
If you call md2pdf with no redirected or piped input, you will be able to key markdown directly into the tool, terminate your input with CTRL+D and it will render what you have entered as a PDF.
md2pdf is under active development, but not all of the Markdown specification is implemented. Some parts of it (such as dealing with inline HTML) may never be supported.
The latest information about the project can be found on its GitHub Page and more specifically in the TODO and README entries.
md2pdf (markdown_prawn) is released under a Creative Commons, Share Alike by Attribution No Commercial (Scotland) licence. Patches and all contributions are welcome, please see the HACKING page for more details.