Hi,

I am considering to move all my "writing" to Markdown - lots of reasons from Version Control to safety as email attachment.

Buuut my end target is typically always paper (formated) as in contracts, biz letters, court briefs, straight-jacketed document(ing) formats and similar ugly stuff.

Currently a spitball of .Doc, .DocX, .Odt, .Pdf and scan formats, sometimes with "mark changes" enabled, sometimes only as MarkUp in PDF and all with edit notes thrown in. Some exchanged via Cloud, but more often email still the way to handle and "document".

Monster besides VSCode and Typora in the running to be tested when I have clear view of all my needs and ~20 - 40 typical MD documents to test - currently only getting mental map and possible ways to forge ahead. (It is summer, reading about stuff is enough for the moment...)

Then I encountered in the docs for the Monster:

PDF Output Generation is not Perfect ...

wkhtml2pdf Limitations some points

Print to PDF Limitations

• No control over page breaks
  

• Limited print control options
  

• Can't specify a custom title header
  

• Doesn't generate a table of contents
  

which sounds bad, as page breaks, p.orientation (changes), p.layout, p.header, p.footer, similar and other stuff like TOC and perhaps even footnotes need to be controled at 1st/other or 1st/even/odd page levels. Not much more - very few Font/Fontsize tuples , an easy way to insert text from meta data, add/update tables from various formats, sometimes pictures which I believe all should be doable.

More "paper writing" control seems to exist in R Markup, but I had thought that either HTML or CSS tags plus PageDoc should be enough - not even Latex needed.

So first Q: Are the PDF warnings still needed / true, if Monster has already eaten PageDoc ?

Monster and VSCode allowing me to tweak things like table inclusion / reload without copy/paste via scripting or AddIn have a good chance over the WYSIWYG promise of Typora - but basic premise must be met, as I want to decide on a single tool for writing.

And yes, I might query for best approaches for "paper layout" in the future 😉

tia

thomas

Markdown isn't a print format, it's an HTML format, so any output for print you create will be created from the HTML output.

And the feature for that is only as good as the tooling available to do that. Unfortunately the tooling is not good - neither the tools I use in MM (wkHtml2Pdf and Print to PDF) nor any of the commercial tools I've tried to replace with offer very good PDF output control. Each has their own strengths and weaknesses but none of them are all-around good. You can also use PanDoc to convert either Markdown or HTML to PDF but it too does a terrible job for PDF conversions last I tried that.

I don't think you'll find better solutions in VS Code or Typora (or any other tool that's not specifically a PDF generation tool).

I don't have an answer, and MM does as well as it can given the tools it supports (ie. wkhtml2pdf and Print to Pdf).

+++ Rick ---