by Danny Quah, Aug 2020 (revised Jan 2022)
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 a particular 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. And vice versa.
Available official Pandoc documentation is voluminous. So as a matter of logic the knowledge to generate PDF from Markdown, to the user's desired degree of control, is already extant, out there somewhere. But a user j