cv/RENDER.md

Rendering markdown to PDF

For documents I intend to distribute (such as this CV), I typically watch markdown files for changes in a couple tmux panes, rendering them to PDF. If the resulting CV is a bit staid, it makes up for it with version control on the CV's contents, and a good workflow. I haven't really automated it beyond this yet.

Prerequisites

• Pandoc (https://github.com/jgm/pandoc)
• A CSS file used by Pandoc for rendering the PDF, in this case something approximating GitHub's readme style (https://github.com/sindresorhus/github-markdown-css, or some such)
• entr (https://github.com/eradman/entr), or some inotify-compatible alternative

Command

echo README.md | entr -s 'pandoc -f gfm -t html --metadata pagetitle="CV, Nicholas Warzin, 2023" --css github.css README.md -o cv_nicholas-warzin_2023.pdf'

Explanation

• -f gfm Assume README.md is written in GitHub-flavoured Markdown, ensuring consistent rendering as a PDF and as a repository's README.md
• -t html Convert to PDF using HTML as the intermediate format (versus, say, LaTeX)
• --metadata pagetitle="..." Give the document a readable page title
• --css github.css Render the document like a GitHub readme