Snippets for Markdown to LaTeX with Pandoc

This is another living post that serves more for my personal benefit than anything else. By living, I mean that I will continue to update it over time as I find things I want to keep easily accessible. This post is a place to paste snippets and boiler plate of Markdown/Pandoc/LaTeX material that I find useful but often forget. There’s probably nothing very genius or awe-inspiring here, but hopefully I won’t have to grep through by bash history as often, trying to remember what I did that one time to do that one thing.

I love using Markdown¹ for a variety of tasks, and if I need to present my work elsewhere (like homework assignments, distribution of meeting notes, etc.) I use Pandoc to convert the Markdown into $\LaTeX$, which makes some lazy writing look much more professional, in my opinion.

Switch back and forth between multiple columns in Pandoc markdown

Include the following in the YAML header:

header-includes:
  - \usepackage{multicol}
  - \newcommand{\hideFromPandoc}[1]{#1}\hideFromPandoc{\let\Begin\begin\let\End\end}

Then begin and end sections of multiple columns like so:

\Begin{multicols}{2} 

#### Sample Equations

\begin{equation}
\frac{dx_1}{dt} = x_2^2 + x_1^3
\end{equation}

\begin{equation}
\frac{dx_2}{dt} = \frac{1}{x_1} \cdot x_2 
\end{equation}

\End{multicols}

Options commonly specified in header

Include in the YAML header as needed:

title: My awesome title
subtitle: and cool subtitle
date: \today # Note: Only works on Linux/OSX going from Markdown -> PDF
geometry: margin=1in
classoption=twocolumn

Output complete LaTeX source for a document

Running the following only outputs the LaTeX source for the content in the document:

$ pandoc source.md -o output.tex

Running this inserts the LaTeX content into your default (or other specified template) and then outputs the complete LaTeX source for generating the document:

$ pandoc source.md -o output.tex  --template default.latex

Adjust space around title in Pandoc

Use the \vspace command in the title option of the YAML header to adjust space as needed around the title. You can use it before, after, or before and after the desire text. In this example, I’m reducing the amount of space before and after the title:

title: \vspace{-5ex}Sample title\vspace{-5ex}

Inspired by this Stack Overflow answer: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/593