# Wordprocessing with vim and pandoc

It has been quite some time since I have needed to create documents
for ordinary folks that expect .docx or .pdf files. Having recently
taken on some administration responsibilities for the radio club I am
a member of, I find myself again needing to create .pdf documents.


## Abiword

At first I installed abiword, along with all its dependencies, which
turned out to be quite a lot. I tried it briefly, but after many
years using vim to edit text, it felt terribly slow and awkward.


## Markdown

Markdown is an excellent minimalist markup that doesn't look out of
place in plain text documents. My phlog, as you may be aware, is
written in markdown. Markdown was chosen as I knew tools existed to
convert it into many other document formats. It can easily be
converted into web pages or document types suitable for printing.
Pandoc is probably the most widely known of these tools. 


## Pandoc

On OpenBSD I installed the pandoc package and attempted the
conversion of a markdown file: 
> $ pandoc myfile.md -o myfile.pdf

Unfortunately something was missing and the conversion failed with an
error. After a short search for the error message, and test
installing other packages, I discovered that texlive_base-2023 and 
texlive_texmf-minimal-2023 were also required.


## Workflow

I write the documents in vim, using markdown in the same way that I
would for my phlog, and then run pandoc on the file to output it in
PDF format. 


## Summary

I use vim for all my text editing and wanted a solution where I could
continue to do that. This solution is fast and avoids any interaction
with a word processor, while achieving the same result. I'm quite
satisfied with it.