grunt-markdown-pdf

Grunt plugin to convert markdown documents to PDF

Thin wrapper around markdown-pdf.

The PDF looks great because it is styled by HTML5 Boilerplate. What? - Yes! Your Markdown is first converted to HTML, then pushed into the HTML5 Boilerplate index.html. Phantomjs renders the page and saves it to a PDF. You can even customise the style of the PDF by passing an optional path to your CSS and you can pre-process your markdown file before it is converted to a PDF by passing in a pre-processing function, for templating.

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt ~0.4.1

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-markdown-pdf --save-dev

One the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-markdown-pdf');

The "markdownpdf" task

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named markdownpdf to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  markdownpdf: {
    options: {
      // Task-specific options go here.
    },
    your_target: {
      // Target-specific file lists and/or options go here.
    },
  }
});

Options

options.phantomPath

Type: String Default value: Path provided by phantomjs module

Path to phantom binary

options.concat

Type: Boolean Default value: false

If set to true, a single PDF will be created containing the contents of all of the Markdown files.

options.cssPath

Type: String Default value: node_modules/markdown-pdf/pdf.css

Path to custom CSS file, relative to the current working directory.

options.paperFormat

Type: String Default value: A4

'A3', 'A4', 'A5', 'Legal', 'Letter' or 'Tabloid'

options.paperOrientation

Type: String Default value: portrait

'portrait' or 'landscape'

options.paperBorder

Type: String Default value: 1cm

Supported dimension units are: 'mm', 'cm', 'in', 'px'

options.renderDelay

Type: Number Default value: 1000

Delay in millis before rendering the PDF (give HTML and CSS a chance to load)

options.preProcessMd

Type: Function Default value: function () { return through() }

A function that returns a through stream that transforms the markdown before it is converted to HTML.

options.preProcessHtml

Type: Function Default value: function () { return through() }

A function that returns a through stream that transforms the HTML before it is converted to markdown.

Usage Examples

Default Options

In this example, the default options are used to convert all markdown files in the directory src/ to PDFs in the directory dest/.

grunt.initConfig({
  markdownpdf: {
    options: {},
    files: {
      src: "src/*.md",
      dest: "dest"
    }
  }
})

Replace characters with preProcessMd

In this example we use a through stream called split to split the markdown file into lines and replace foo with bar.

var split = require("split")

grunt.initConfig({
  markdownpdf: {
    dist: {
      options: {
        preProcessMd: function () {
          return split(function (line) {
            return line.replace("foo", "bar") + "\n"
          })
        }
      },
      src: "document.md",
      dest: "dist/"
    }
  }
})

Contributing

In lieu of a formal styleguide, take care to maintain the existing coding style. Add unit tests for any new or changed functionality. Lint and test your code using Grunt.

Release History

2013-12-27 v2.0.0 Use updated (streaming) markdown-pdf module and implement concat files properly
2013-09-04 v1.0.0 Use updated markdown-pdf module - CSS path is now relative to current working directory
2013-06-14 v0.3.0 Use marked module for better markdown compatibility and performance
2013-05-30 v0.2.0 Allow concatenation of multiple source files to produce a single PDF
2013-05-19 v0.1.0 Callback hooks allowing markdown (and html) content to be pre-processed
2013-05-19 v0.0.0 Initial release

y-jono/grunt-markdown-pdf