Why don’t you save the long pandoc command lines as a bash script?

In this project I write in Markdown most of the time. I may need the same text in many formats:

• .docx for the boss
• .pdf for nice presentations
• .tex for serious work
• .epub for ebooks
• .mobi for Kindle

I have chosen to write most of my texts in Markdown. Pandoc can transform Markdown to all the formats above. Except perhaps .mobi. Here you need Amazon’s kindlegen.

In order to create an Ebook and a Kindle version, you need to:

pandoc myText.md -o myText.epub
kindlegen myText.epub


Kindlegen will create a file with the .mobi extension: myFile.mobi. That’s it. Your book is ready for Kindle.

Here’s a list of pages, that I tend to use over and over again:

• Daring FireBall: Markdown.
• Using Pandoc to Create Your ePub eBook.
• The best tutorial: Creating an ebook with pandoc.
• How We Automated Our Ebook Builds With Pandoc and KindleGen.

Let’s try a conversion from Markdown to an eBook. The –ebook-cover will ad a frontpage. So you’ll have an eBook with a nice cover. The –toc means Table of Content.

pandoc -s --epub-cover-image=owl.jpg --toc meta.txt markdown.md -o x.epub


As you progress the pandoc commandline tends to become very long indeed. I save such lines i as a bash script. Here’s a sample:

#!/bin/bash
# Create the eBook and a Kindle version of the same
pandoc -S --epub-cover-image=owl.jpg --toc -o yourBook.epub meta.txt markdown.md
kindlegen yourBook.epub


Save the file as myFile.sh. Then run this command: chmod a+x myFile.sh. Now you can run the entire command like this:

./myFile.sh

in a terminal. As soon as your pandoc command works you can save it for future use. You could even save the script in

/usr/local/bin/

Then you can use your script as a Linux command.

I’m sure that you can do something similar in Windows or OSX. In the heyday of MS DOS I might have saved the pandoc command in a .bat file. But in the end I prefer a Linux solution.

– By thine own ingenium create your solution …