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Export to PDF#

This #recipe shows how to export a note to PDF.

Required extensions#

Required third-party tools#

Check that Pandoc is installed by opening a terminal and running pandoc --version.

Check that Pandoc can produce PDFs with LaTeX by running the following in the terminal.

echo It is working > test.md
pandoc test.md -o test.pdf

Instructions#

  1. Create a folder in your workspace named .pandoc. Take note of the full path to this directory. The rest of this recipe will refer to this path as $WORKSPACE/.pandoc.

  2. Download the template file foam.latex from Hegghammer/foam-templates and place it in $WORKSPACE/.pandoc.

  3. In VSCode, open settings.json for your user (or just for your workspace if you prefer), and add the following line:

"pandoc.pdfOptString": "--from=markdown+wikilinks_title_after_pipe --resource-path $WORKSPACE/.pandoc --template foam --listings",

Make sure to replace $WORKSPACE/.pandoc with the real full path to the .pandoc directory you created earlier.

  1. Open a Foam note in VSCode.

  2. Press Ctrl + k, p. Choose "pdf", and press Enter.

The PDF should look something like this:

Sample PDF output

Options#

If you include a name in the author parameter in the YAML of the Foam note, that name will feature in the PDF header on the top left.

If you don't want syntax highlighting and frames around the codeblocks, remove --listings from the pandoc.pdfOptString parameter in settings.json.

Further customization#

If you know some LaTeX, you can tweak the foam.latex template to your needs. Alternatively, you can supply another ready-made template such as Eisvogel; just place the TEMPLATE_NAME.latex file in $WORKSPACE/.pandoc. You can also use all of Pandoc's other functionalities by tweaking the pandoc.pdfOptString parameter in settings.json.