Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)?

I did a customized-MD pipeline which normalized to pandoc (extra features got encoded to pass through pandoc), obtained the pandoc JSON ast, and emitted html/latex/etc using Julia pattern matching. The code was small, and the yak shave and husbandry was worth escaping the struggle with sea of crufty candidate tools, each with assorted one-chosen-point in a high-dimensional design space, and missing features, misfeatures, gotchas, and mazes ("maybe if I combine this unmaintained plugin with that one and add a postprocess massage step over there and then maybe..." - blech).

Use this and add sed lines for any required non-breakyness per normal CSS, rules can be specific to @media print as required.

  $ cat ~/bin/mdview 
  #!/bin/bash
  # markdown viewer
  tmpfile=.mdview.tmp-`uuidgen`.html
  # start html
  echo "img{margin:20px;max-width:100%}@media print{img{max-height:90%;max-width:90%;page-break-after:always}}body{margin:6em;font-family:sans}pre,code{font-weight:bold;font-size:110%;font-family:Ubuntu Mono}" >${tmpfile}
  # duplicate markdown for modification
  cp ${1} ${1}.mdtmp
  # add extra newline after trailing :
  sed -i -e 's/: \*$/:\r\r\n\n/' ${1}.mdtmp
  # generate HTML from markdown
  #  note the --html-no-skiphtml --html-no-escapehtml allows the preservation
  #  of  anchors within text to allow [link][#anchorname]
  lowdown --html-no-skiphtml --html-no-escapehtml -thtml ${1}.mdtmp >>${tmpfile}
  # remove the temporary markdown file
  rm ${1}.mdtmp
  # add newline before images
  sed -i -e 's/