A update on my markdown workflow

Markdown as a presentation tool, with minor changes in your workflow.

I write almost everything in Markdown now — notes, slides, this blog. Not because it’s fashionable, but because it gets out of the way. Plain text, version-controllable, editable in any editor, and it outlives whatever app was trendy when you wrote it. The one thing that used to send me back to LaTeX or PowerPoint was producing a nicely typeset PDF or a slide deck at the end. Turns out you don’t need to leave Markdown for that either — Pandoc handles both.

Markdown to PDF

Pandoc converts a Markdown file straight into a properly typeset PDF, using LaTeX as the engine under the hood without you having to write any LaTeX yourself:

pandoc notes.md --pdf-engine=xelatex \
  -V geometry:"a4paper,margin=25mm" \
  -V mainfont="TeX Gyre Heros" \
  -o notes.pdf

A few flags worth knowing:

• --pdf-engine=xelatex: lets you use system fonts (mainfont, monofont) instead of being stuck with Computer Modern.
• -V geometry:...: page size and margins, same syntax as LaTeX’s geometry package.
• --highlight-style=kate: nicer syntax highlighting for code blocks than the default.
• -V linkcolor:blue: makes links visibly blue instead of the default boxed/black links in the PDF.

The result reads like a proper typeset document — headers, tables, code blocks, footnotes, citations if you use them — from a file you could just as easily read as plain text.

Markdown to slides

The same file (or a slightly restructured one, split by #/## headers into slides) can become a Beamer presentation:

pandoc slides.md -t beamer -V theme=metropolis -o slides.pdf

Metropolis is a clean, modern Beamer theme — no clip art, no gradients, just readable slides. This has mostly replaced Keynote/PowerPoint for me for technical talks: I outline the talk as headers and bullet points, and Pandoc does the layout.

Beamer-specific options (theme, progress bar, slide numbering) go in the YAML frontmatter of slides.md itself, so slides.md is fully self-contained and doesn’t need any flags beyond -t beamer:

---
title:
author:
date: \today
colortheme: dove
themeoptions:
- block=fill
- numbering=fraction
- progressbar=frametitle
---

# This is a sample heading for slides

Each top-level (or second-level, depending on --slide-level) header becomes a new slide, so the rest of the file is just headers and bullets under them.

The vim bindings (extra)

Since I’m always inside vim/neovim when writing Markdown, I wired both of these up as leader-key shortcuts so I never have to leave the editor or retype the command:

autocmd FileType markdown nnoremap <leader>p :!pandoc "%" --pdf-engine=xelatex -V linkcolor:blue -V geometry:"a4paper,margin=25mm" -V fontsize=10pt -V mainfont="TeX Gyre Heros" -V monofont="Latin Modern Mono" --highlight-style=kate -s -o "%:r.pdf" >/tmp/pandoc.log 2>&1 &<CR><CR>

autocmd FileType markdown map <Leader>b :!pandoc "%:p" -t beamer -V theme=metropolis -o "%:p:r.pdf" >/tmp/pandoc.log 2>&1 &<CR><CR>

• <leader>p builds a PDF from the current file.
• <leader>b builds Beamer slides from the current file.

Both run Pandoc in the background (trailing &), redirect output to /tmp/pandoc.log so a failed build doesn’t clutter vim, and use %:r/%:p:r to name the output PDF after the source file automatically. Only active for filetype=markdown, so it doesn’t stomp on leader mappings in other file types.