by Danny Quah Aug 2020
TL;DR: I write technical articles in LaTeX. But shorter, non-technical writings are easier to do in Markdown. How do I produce PDF from Markdown documents? Answer: provide YAML information in the Markdown; run Pandoc (typically through a Makefile or Atom's Markdown Preview Enhanced). To make all this work, some adjustment is needed in Pandoc options and template files.
Pandoc is a filter that takes a written document in its given format, and produces a version of that same document in yet a different format. I use Pandoc primarily to transform Markdown documents to PDF, but I also draw on Pandoc to convert Word or ODT documents to Markdown. Or vice versa.