Eisvogel

buildpassing
A clean pandoc LaTeX template to convert your markdown files to PDF or LaTeX. It is
designed for lecture notes and exercises with a focus on computer science. The template is
compatible with pandoc 2.

Preview

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A custom title page

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 A custom title page

Installation

1. Install pandoc from http://pandoc.org/. You also need to install LaTeX.

2. Move the template eisvogel.tex to your pandoc templates folder and rename the file to
eisvogel.latex.The location of the templates folder depends on your operating system:
• Unix, Linux, macOS: ~/.pandoc/templates/
• Windows XP: C:\Documents And Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\pandoc
• Windows Vista or later: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\pandoc
If there are no folders called templates or pandoc you need to create them and put the
template eisvogel.latex inside.

Usage

1. Open the terminal and navigate to the folder where your markdown file is located.

2. Execute the following command

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --from markdown --template eisvogel --listings

where example.md is the markdown file you want to convert to PDF.

In order to have nice headers and footers you need to supply metadata to your document. You
can do that with a YAML metadata block at the top of your markdown document (see the
example markdown file). Your markdown document may look like the following:

---
title: "The Document Title"
author: [Example Author, Another Author]
date: "2017-02-20"
keywords: [Markdown, Example]
...

Here is the actual document text...

Custom Template Variables

This template defines some new variables to control the appearance of the title page. The existing
template variables from pandoc are all supported and their documentation can be found in the

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pandoc manual.

• titlepage (defaults to false)

turns on the title page when true

• titlepage-color

the background color of the title page. The color value must be given as an HTML hex
color like D8DE2C without the leading number sign (#). When specifying the color in YAML,
it is advisable to enclose it in quotes like so titlepage-color: "D8DE2C" to avoid the
truncation of the color (e.g. 000000 becoming 0).

• titlepage-text-color (defaults to 5F5F5F)

the text color of the title page

• titlepage-rule-color (defaults to 435488)

the color of the rule on the top of the title page

• titlepage-rule-height (defaults to 4)

the height of the rule on the top of the title page (in points)

• caption-justification (defaults to raggedright)

justification setting for captions (uses the justification parameter of the caption package)

• toc-own-page (defaults to false)

begin new page after table of contents, when true

• listings-disable-line-numbers (defaults to false)

disables line numbers for all listings

• disable-header-and-footer (default to false)

disables the header and footer completely on all pages

• header-left (defaults to the title)

the text in the left of the header

• header-center

the text in the center of the header

• header-right (defaults to the date)

the text in the right of the header

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 • footer-left (defaults to the author)

the text in the left of the footer

• footer-center

the text in the center of the footer

• footer-right (defaults to the page number)

the text in the right of the footer

Examples

Numbered Sections

For PDFs with numbered sections use the --number-sections or -N option.

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --number-sections

Syntax Highlighting with Listings

You can get syntax highlighting of delimited code blocks by using the LaTeX package listings
with the option --listings. This example will produce the same syntax highlighting as in the
example PDF.

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --listings

Syntax Highlighting Without Listings

The following examples show syntax highlighting of delimited code blocks without using listings.
To see a list of all the supported highlight styles, type pandoc --list-highlight-styles.

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --highlight-style pygments

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --highlight-style kate

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --highlight-style espresso

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel --highlight-style tango

Standalone LaTeX Document

To produce a standalone LaTeX document for compiling with any LaTeX editor use .tex as an
output file extension.

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pandoc example.md -o example.tex --template eisvogel

Changing the Document Language

The default language of this template is American English. The lang variable identifies the
main language of the document, using a code according to BCP 47 (e.g. en or en-GB). For an
incomplete list of the supported language codes see the documentation for the hyph-utf8 package
(Section 2). The following example changes the language to British English:

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel -V lang=en-GB

The following example changes the language to German:

pandoc example.md -o example.pdf --template eisvogel -V lang=de

Typesetting a Book

The template uses the default KOMA-Script class scrartcl as the document class because
it has some advantages over the default article class. For typesetting a book I recommend
the corresponding KOMA-Script class scrbook instead of the default book. You can manually
replace the string scrartcl in the template with scrbook.

To get the correct chapter headings you need to tell pandoc that it should convert first
level headings (indicated by one # in markdown) to chapters with the command line option
--top-level-division=chapter.

There will be one blank page before each chapter because the template is two-sided per default. So
if you plan to publish your book as a PDF and don’t need a blank page you should add the class
option onesided which can be done by supplying a template variable -V classoption=oneside.

Example Images

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A green title page

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A green title page

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images and tables

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 images and tables

Credits

• This template includes code for styling block quotations from pandoc-letter by Aaron
Wolen.

License

This project is open source licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License. Please see the LICENSE
file for more information.

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