Install

Dependencies

  • Pandoc. Does most of the work converting Markdown to other formats.

  • Tectonic. Recommended PDF engine for Pandoc. Instead of installing the whole TeXLive distribution, Tectonic only downloads the packages required for your file. It will also be used internally to generated imposition and binding formats.

  • pdfinfo program provided by Poppler. Only needed if you want to produce PDF. Currently it’s only used to figure out PDF page count. If you know of another way to reliably find PDFs page count, please let us know.

Ready to go environment

If you’re using Linux x86_64, we recommend using haini.sh. It will install an Alpine 3.13 distribution on a subdirectory and install pre-built gems from https://gems.sutty.nl/.

After installing haini.sh, run this command to install missing dependencies:

haini.sh apk add --no-cache pandoc tectonic poppler-utils

Manual install

Install dependencies using your package manager of choice. If they provide too old versions (in comparison to the versions announced on their webpages), you may be missing features or experience broken builds, and you may need to install them via alternative sources (download the binary, build from source, etc.)

We recommend rbenv and ruby-build to prepare a Ruby 2.7 environment.

Some of the gems will need a working compiler and some of your CPU time. Depending on your operating system distribution, you’ll need to install development headers using your package manager.

Using Pacman package manager

# As root
pacman -Sy base-devel

Using APT package manager

# As root
apt install build-essential