Effortlessly Transform Your Markdown Documents to Accessible Formats with Pandoc

I have been experimenting extensively with Ollama and other artificial intelligence tools, and the answers to my prompts are always rendered in Markdown. I have Marktext on my Linux computer and MacDown on my MacBook Air, so I can easily copy and paste the output into either of those editors and save it as a Markdown file. However, when I want to share those files with colleagues who are unfamiliar with Markdown, I need a way to convert those files into a format that’s easily accessible for them. My Markdown editors can only export the Markdown files as HTML or PDF.

That problem is easily solved with Pandoc, a great tool that anyone can install on Linux, MacOS, or Windows that easily converts Markdown into various formats. Easily install Pandoc on Linux with the following commands:

$ sudo dnf install pandoc
or 
$ sudo apt install pandoc

On MacOS, use Hombrew to easily install Pandoc by opening a terminal and entering the following command.

$ brew install pandoc

You can install Pandoc on Microsoft Windows using Chocolatey with the following command:

choco install pandoc

Once the application is installed, it works very well from the command line. The project maintains great documentation. I needed to convert a Markdown document to .docx so my Windows-using colleagues could easily read the output from the LLM I had been using. I used the documentation and the program’s man page on my Linux system to enter the following command.

$ pandoc -o ProposedLease.docx -f markdown -t docx LeaseReview.md

The conversion was flawless and occurred in a second or two. Your experience may vary based on CPU, RAM, and the length of the document converted. The Markdown file of our lease review was converted to “ProposedLease.docx,” which I could easily share with my colleagues using Microsoft Word.

If you are uncomfortable installing software on your computer or an unprivileged user in a corporate or educational setting, you can use Pandoc online. Pandooc is open source with a GPL v2 license. For more information about Pandoc, consult their website and examine all of the options the program provides.