Markdown to LaTeX conversion Script

Nowadays I do almost all of the documents for the courses I teach in Markdown format, but sometimes I would like to have printer-friendly versions of these documents. I have failed miserably at trying to create a printer-friendly style sheet that works with our Moodle theme, so I decided to try to use my markdown source files to generate pdf files.

Fletcher Penny’s excellent Multimarkdown package has an option for output in LaTeX format, but I have found that its output is not ready to be compiled. It lacks a preamble and a few other LaTeX indicators that tell the program where stuff is and what to do with it. Rather than have to add these lines in by hand every time, I have written a script that will take my Markdown files and convert them to LaTeX, adding in all of the necessary LaTeX commands and compiling to pdf. It also runs some substitution commands to handle special UTF8 characters, since LaTeX has different formatting for these. At the moment, I want all of my files to be in the same document class, but it would not be too hard to add command-line options for the script that would allow for alternate document classes.

I hope someone else finds the script useful too. To see with proper indentation and syntax highlighting click here.

#!/bin/bash - 
#=============================================================================
#
#          FILE: mkd2latex.sh 
# 
#         USAGE: ./mkd2latex somefile.mkd <fontsize>
# 
#   DESCRIPTION: Converts markdown files to LaTeX and performs
#   various cleanup tasks for foreign characters, etc.
# 
#       OPTIONS: ---
#  REQUIREMENTS: multimarkdown, latex
#          BUGS: ---
#         NOTES: ---
#        AUTHOR: Jonathan Kulp (),
#  ORGANIZATION: 
#       CREATED: 10/14/2012 06:52:09 AM CDT
#      REVISION:  ---
#=============================================================================

# get the environment sorted out first

infile=$(readlink -f $1)
stem=$(basename $infile | sed -e 's/\..*$//')
basedir=$(dirname "$infile")
outdir="$basedir/out"
nohtml="$outdir/$stem-nohtml.mkd"
tempfile="$outdir/$stem.tmp"
outfile="$basedir/$stem.tex"
createdon=$(date +%m\/%d\/%Y,\ %r)

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# make a place to put the garbage
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------

if [ -e "$outdir" ] ; then
    echo "Output directory already exists"
  else
    mkdir "$outdir"
fi

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#  check to see if fontsize is specified, if not default to 11
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
if [ -z "$2" ] ; then
    size="11"
  else
    size="$2"
fi

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#  Default output of multimarkdown has no preamble, do that here.
#  Change options as desired.
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------

preamble(){
cat >> $tempfile << EOFpreamble
  \documentclass[$size pt,oneside,letterpaper]{article} 
  \usepackage{fullpage,amsmath,tabu,hyperref} 
  \begin{document}
  \thispagestyle{empty}
EOFpreamble
} # ----------  end of function preamble ----------

remove_tags (){
  sed -f - $infile > $nohtml << EOFnotags
  s/]*>/#/
  s/]*>/##/
  s/]*>/###/
  s/<\/h[1-3]>//
EOFnotags
} # ----------  end of function remove_tags  ----------

run_multimarkdown(){
  multimarkdown -t latex $nohtml >> $tempfile
} # ----------  end of function run_multimarkdown ----------

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#   Put the LaTeX \end{document} command, creation date, etc.
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
postamble(){
cat >> $tempfile << EOFpostamble
  \hspace*{\fill} \\\\
  \begin{center} \begin{small}
  This printer-friendly document was generated with \LaTeX \  on $createdon.
  \end{small} \end{center}
  \end{document}
EOFpostamble
} # ----------  end of function postamble ----------

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#  Convert any international characters to LaTeX's format, also
#  change to unnumbered sections and parts, change chapters to sections.
#  Get rid of autorefs like "Back to top"
#  Note that to insert a single quote ' you have to surround the
#  sed command with double quotes instead of the usual single
#  quotes.
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------

fixes(){
  sed -f - $tempfile > $outfile << EOFsed
  /label/d
  /<\/style>/d
  s/chapter/section/
  s/part{/part\*{/
  s/tion{/tion\*{/
  s/ó/\\\'{o}/g
  s/ñ/\\\~{n}/g
  s/ò/\\\`{o}/g
  s/è/\\\`{e}/g
  s/à/\\\`{a}/g
  s/á/\\\'{a}/g
  s/í/\\\'{i}/g
  s/ú/\\\'{u}/g
  s/ö/\\\"{o}/g
  s/ä/\\\"{a}/g
  s/ü/\\\"{u}/g
  s/é/\\\'{e}/g
EOFsed
} # ----------  end of function fixes ----------


#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#  Compile the cleaned-up LaTeX code & output as pdf
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------

compile (){
  pdflatex -halt-on-error -output-format pdf --output-directory $outdir $outfile
  cp $outdir/$stem.pdf $basedir/$stem.pdf
}	# ----------  end of function compile  ----------


#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
#  Open it up in a pdf viewer
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------
preview (){
  xdg-open $basedir/$stem.pdf &
}	# ----------  end of function preview  ----------

#cd $basedir
preamble
remove_tags
run_multimarkdown
postamble
fixes
compile
preview

rm -rf $outdir

exit 0