mdpdf

A small C CLI that converts Markdown to PDF.

• Uses only standard PDF fonts (Helvetica for body text, Courier for code). No font embedding; output stays small
• Detects paper size automatically (en_US/en_CA use Letter, otherwise A4). Override with PAPERSIZE or /etc/papersize
• Renders headings, paragraphs, inline bold/italic/code, fenced and indented code blocks, unordered and ordered lists, blockquotes, horizontal rules, and images (JPEG/PNG)
• Depends only on zlib (for PNG)

Building

make

One make call builds the tool. GCC or Clang with a C11-capable standard library and zlib-dev (or equivalent) is required.

To install system-wide:

sudo make install   # installs to /usr/local/bin/

Usage

mdpdf input.md            # writes input.pdf
mdpdf input.md output.pdf # explicit output path

Supported Markdown

Feature	Example
ATX headings	# H1 … ###### H6
Setext headings	Title\n===
Bold	**bold** or __bold__
Italic	*italic* or _italic_
Bold-italic	***both***
Inline code	`code`
Fenced code block	```lang
Indented code block	4-space or tab indent
Unordered list	- item
Ordered list	1. item
Blockquote	> text
Horizontal rule	---
Image	
Link	[text](url) (text rendered in blue, clickable hyperlink)

Images

JPEG and PNG are supported. The path in ![alt](path) is resolved relative to the Markdown file directory.

JPEG images are embedded directly (DCTDecode). PNG images are decoded using zlib and the raw pixels are re-compressed with FlateDecode.