Pandoc Transformer for Alfresco

Writing documentation in a word processor can be a tedious job. Writing it in Markdown on the other hand is nice :) Since there's no previewer for Markdown documents in Alfresco, a transformer is the next best thing. This projects aim is to create a simple transformer that creates PDF documents out of Markdown documents. To achieve this it uses the excellent Pandoc command line binary. This module only handles conversions from .md to .pdf, but it can be extended to handle other formats too, as long as Pandoc supports them.

Building

Follow these steps to download the source code and to build the project.

1. git clone https://github.com/oakman/pandoc-transformer
2. cd pandoc-transfomer
3. mvn clean package

This builds a .jar file that can then be used in an Alfresco installation. To build with integration testing, issue mvn -Pit,purge clean verify instead.

Installation

Ubuntu

1. Copy the .jar file to the tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/lib folder.
2. Install pandoc. Don't use the package manager version, it's probably too old. Download the .deb package instead from here and install it with dpkg -i <package-file>.
3. In order for PDF's to be created, LaTeX is used. Install it with sudo apt-get install texlive or sudo apt-get install texlive-full.

Mac OS X

1. Copy the .jar file to the tomcat/webapps/alfresco/WEB-INF/lib folder.
2. Install pandoc. The homebrew version is nice, install it with brew install pandoc.
3. In order for PDF's to be created, LaTeX is used. There's a huge package that needs to be installed, do this with homebrew brew cask install mactex. It could also work with a stripped down version, BasicTeX. To install that one, use brew cask install basictex instead of the previous command.

Windows

Who in it's right mind uses Windows? If you happen to do this, you're on your own.

Configuration

In order for this module to work properly, there's one configuration key that has to be checked if it's correct, and configured if it's not correct.

pandoc.exe=/usr/local/bin/pandoc

If installed in Ubuntu it most probably need to be configured, if installed on Mac OS X & Homebrew it's probably correct.