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

> I have a very long regular expression (email validation of course)

On a tangentially related note, I guarantee you that your regex is wrong. There is only one way to validate an email address:

Send an email to it and have them respond. Otherwise you will block some valid users.

Now of course you can make a regex that gets most email addresses, and if you're ok with that, then that's fine. But if you don't want to accidentally exclude someone, then sending email is the only way to validate it.

I don't know what the scope of this is, but https://pagedjs.org/ is Javascript that does pagination and page margin styling. It's essentially a polyfill for CSS Paged Media: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-page-3/

Pretty nice to work with, if you can run JS. (The rest is just Puppeteer to print. Though I couldn't use their command line tool, because it force-injects paged.js, and it didn't play well with the Preact components for previewing I had made.)

It's very easy to make a regex that allows all, but catches simple errors: /.+@.+/. Maybe narrow down the domain name, but don't forget that trailing dots are valid in DNS names.

Why is everyone trying to check for things they don't have to? If you need a valid email address, of course you have to send an email for confirmation. anna@example.com is perfectly syntactically valid, but isn't useful to anyone for sending emails. If you optionally want your users to enter an email address, don't overcomplicate things.

Hi, thanks for all the suggestions, Typst ultimately worked best, as I was generating my Markdown file with a script I could modify it to generate a Typst file and all of the links and highlighting worked beautifully.

I am not familiar with Pandoc, but it looks like a command-line tool that can do the same things? (Edit: I suspect this is probably one of those situations where different industries/domains end up developing similar tools in different ecosystems... Pandoc probably makes sense in academia, LaTex workflows, etc.? Mdast is used for web apps. I can see both realms wanting to do Markdown conversions, so I'm not surprised to see similar tools available in both. I'm a web dev, so only familiar with Mdast.)

My guess is that either toolchain could do the job... maybe just depends on personal preference whether someone prefers to pipe together command-line tools in a bash script, vs making use of the npm ecosystem (mdast is all in JS).

Maybe the popularity of JS & npm means there are available mdast plugins & third party packages that can help with whatever niche transformation you might need, and custom node rendering is just a lambda away. It's all in JS for a seamless experience, and there is no separate DSL to learn (just some basic helper functions).

That might be harder to do in Pandoc... (might need a custom Lua filter or another language like your Julia pattern matching?)

As for effectiveness... it probably just depends on the particular implementer :) I'd trust a grizzled old *NIX sysadmin type over your typical bootcamp JS programmer any day, but also... the JS ecosystem is pretty mature and powerful now, and Mdast is pretty amazing. At work we use it to build one of the most important parts of our app, and its power and flexibility never cease to amaze me.