md2pdf is a little project that aims to make it easy to produce
professional-looking PDF documents from Markdown files via a LaTeX template and
the help of Pandoc.

There are several motivations for this:

- Word processor software does not work very nicely with version control, plain-text Markdown files do
- Collaborating on a single ODT/DOC file is prone to overwriting others' work
- LibreOffice and Word both suck with automatic figure and table numbering on long files, and with TOCs etc
- It's painful trying to keep everyone using the right font, spacing, formatting, etc. when collaborating with ODT/DOC files
- PDF output from LibreOffice and Word often looks pretty average
- It's distracting having to worry about formatting while writing - Markdown takes away all but the most basic formatting options to focus you on writing

With an appropriate template, LaTeX PDF output is undeniably the prettiest-
looking way to create documents. But, learning LaTeX is hard. Markdown
is much easier to use, and when used with Pandoc can still produce superb PDF
documents. md2pdf makes it simple to manage having the right LaTeX templates and
configuration across a whole team, by using a central server to do the PDF
generation and then share the result with those who need it.

This Python application uses CherryPy to present a REST interface for submitting
Markdown files to, and then requesting rendered PDFs from. It is intended to be
used in conjunction with an `md2pdf-client` application, see
it's GitHub page at https://github.com/seanlano/md2pdf-client for more
information.