Plurrrr

Tue 07 Jul 2026

Generating a PDF file with Pandoc and Docker

Last week I started with the Python Certification course on freeCodeCamp. I keep notes on paper which I transfer later to a Markdown file using vim.

I wanted to convert this Markdown file to a PDF file using Pandoc. Because I have already Docker running on my Mac mini I checked if there was an official Docker image.

I first tried the Pandoc minimal image. I ran into an issue: Permission denied. Adding -v /tmp:/tmp to the command solved this issue, but now it reported 'pdflatex' not found. This version was too minimal!

So, next I tried the aptly named latex image as follows:

docker run --rm \
  -v "$(pwd):/data"\
  -u $(id -u):$(id -g) \
  pandoc/latex freecodecamp.md \
  -o freecodecamp.pdf &&
  open freecodecamp.pdf

This downloaded the image (only the first time), generated the PDF and opened the PDF file in the Preview application on macOS.