Process

• Another nice example of a pipeline for building PDFs and other formats from Markdown source files.
  • I’ve been looking for a way to incorporate a visual compilation process in with my regular note taking here in my Vim roam setup, but don’t think PDF will work well with as much bouncing around that I do
• Uses a large draw.io document for creating figures
  • Looks like a nice tool but I also have Illustrator
  • Would also likely prefer Tikz if working LaTeX
• Then has a Makefile to piece Markdown, figures, etc together into a PDF using Pandoc
• Comments briefly on his vim config, using the virtualedit option
  • This option looks awful, I can’t imagine why I’d need it
  • If only he knew about automatically formatted tables in Vim’s Markdown plugins or Vimwiki…

Summary

Overall he uses split screen fullscreen Mac (left side Vim, right side generated PDF) to write a book and preview it. Pandoc is used to convert the Markdown files to PDF, which is wrapped up by a nice Makefile. Figures are drawn and saved as SVGs using draw.io.

Hacker News Link

• HN link with some useful comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854332
• Nice comment here about using Vim + Pandoc + Beamer class + pdfpc for creating and showing presentations, will be using this in the future