Pandoc (Markdown - Latex) Support

[michaelk99]

What and Why

I like to use pandoc to generate nice beamer slides from a markdown file
pandoc -t beamer pres.md -o pres.pdf

Unfortunately, this jku beamer theme does not work out-of-the box.
I've setup my tex installation so that the jku beamer template on the respective path and this works with normal latex beamer slides.

Example

See the attached file pres.md
If theme: Boadilla is selected the file pres.pdf is generated without errors.
pres.pdf

Error

When I set the JKU theme in the Markdown file theme: jku, I get the following error:

Error producing PDF.
! LaTeX Error: \begin{itemize} on input line 146 ended by \end{beamer@framepauses}.

See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type H for immediate help.
...

l.146

\end{frame}

[michaelroland]

Thanks for reporting! Could you check if PR #8 works for you too?

I tested with the following pandoc preamble:

---
title: JKU Presentation Theme
subtitle: for Pandoc with \LaTeX\ Beamer
author:
- Space for speaker names
institute:
- Space for institute name
date: \today
classoption:
- ngerman
- english
theme: jku
aspectratio: 169
section-titles: false
# Note: Do not set section-titles to true. Use appropriate themeoptions instead.
themeoptions:
- darkmode
- fancyfonts
- totalframenumber
- mathastext
tables: true
biblatex: true
biblatexoptions:
- backend=biber
- citestyle=authoryear
- sortcites=true
- style=ACM-Reference-Format
bibliography: references.bib
csquotes: true
indent: true
---

Note that you should set section-titles to false, set appropriate classoption (particularly language settings for babel, etc to work) and themeoptions to configure the JKU beamer theme (color mode, etc.)

[michaelk99]

Thanks for the quick fix and the detailed pandoc preamble! Works as expected!

[michaelroland]

Btw. for the full design experience of the template, you may want to compile using the XeLaTeX toolchain with

pandoc -t beamer --slide-level=3 --pdf-engine=latexmk --pdf-engine-opt=-gg --pdf-engine-opt=-bibtex --pdf-engine-opt=-pdfxe main.md -o main.pdf

or

pandoc -t beamer --slide-level=3 --pdf-engine=xelatex main.md -o main.pdf

Use --slide-level=N to determine the heading level that will produce frames in case you want sectioning (with --slide-level=3, level 1 headings will produces section slides, level 2 headings subsection slides, and level 3 headings will produce frame titles)

[michaelk99]

Thanks! I'll give it a try!

[michaelroland]

Do you have some longer source file with typical pandoc/markdown features that you use in your projects? Would be interesting as a test-case ...

[michaelk99]

I mainly use it as a quick way to produce slides for meetings based on some notes. So mainly some images and Latex equations. Need to look into setting up the bibliography.

[jondo]

Here's a small example (adapted from here, tested with Pandoc 2.9.2.1 and pandoc-citeproc 0.17.0.1, both from Ubuntu 22.04), showing the following features: list, enumeration, web link, bibliographic reference, image, equation, table.

markdown-slides.zip