Installing the latest version of Pandoc on Ubuntu 17.04
May 17, 2017
This tutorial describes how I installed the latest version of Pandoc on Ubuntu 17.04 and installed additional packages in order to convert my resume written in Markdown to a PDF file.
Installing the latest version of Pandoc
I downloaded and installed the deb of
the
latest Pandoc release
as follows:
wget https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/\
1.19.2.1/pandoc-1.19.2.1-1-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i pandoc-1.19.2.1-1-amd64.deb
rm pandoc-1.19.2.1-1-amd64.deb
I verified that Pandoc got installed correctly and that the version
reported matched the version installed using pandoc -v. This gave
the following output:
pandoc 1.19.2.1
Compiled with pandoc-types 1.17.0.4, texmath 0.9, skylighting 0.1.1.4
Default user data directory: /home/john/.pandoc
Copyright (C) 2006-2016 John MacFarlane
Web: http://pandoc.org
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is no warranty, not even for merchantability or fitness
for a particular purpose.
Installing pdflatex
In order to get the pdflatex program, required to convert the LaTeX
created by pandoc to PDF, I installed texlive-latex-recommended as
follows.
sudo apt-get install -y texlive-latex-recommended
This used nearly 800 MB of additional disk space. When I tested generating my PDF resume via Pandoc I ended up with the following LaTeX error:
! LaTeX Error: File `enumitem.sty' not found.
Type X to quit or <RETURN> to proceed,
or enter new name. (Default extension: sty)
Enter file name:
! Emergency stop.
<read *>
l.14 \usepackage
pandoc: Error producing PDF
Using apt-cache search gave the following two results:
$ apt-cache search enumitem
texlive-lang-german - TeX Live: German
texlive-latex-extra - TeX Live: LaTeX additional packages
In my case the latter was the obvious choice, which I installed using
apt-get as follows:
sudo apt-get install -y texlive-latex-extra
This is most likely not a minimal install of LaTeX, as this used over 600 MB of additional disk space. However, I preferred this over manually installing LaTeX packages, especially as I was not sure how many were missing nor which ones I would need in the future.
Testing
If you want to test this installation the same way as I did, git is
required. Install it as follows:
sudo apt-get install -y git
Next, clone my resume repository as follows:
git clone https://github.com/john-bokma/resume-pandoc.git
Change into the resume-pandoc directory:
cd resume-pandoc/
And generate the PDF version of my resume as follows:
pandoc perl-programmer-john-bokma-resume.md -f markdown+yaml_metadata_block \
--template templates/jb2resume.latex \
-o perl-programmer-john-bokma-resume.pdf
For more information on the template I used and its settings, see resume-pandoc.