Pandoc and html5 exporting pdf's with huge margins

Question

So I'm trying Pandoc for the first time. Everything seems great but when exporting via html5 (wkhtmltopdf) my pdf output is saved with huge margins on all sides.

pandoc -t html5 -s example.md -o output.pdf

output.pdf (content output highlighted in red)

What I've tried:

• Reinstalling pdflatex
• Reinstalling wkhtmltopdf
• Including CSS to remove the margins

Am I missing something?

What I want: Write a markdown document using Typora -> Use Pandoc to apply TOC and page numbering -> Use html5 to export pdf with custom styling.

Saleratus

if you use -t html, you don't need pdflatex. so don't bother reinstalling it. to change the styling, modify your HTML template then: see pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#templates – Sheepfold

Answer 1

These pass through vars for wkhtmltopdf worked for me (ubuntu 18.10 pandoc 2.6) : https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#variables-for-wkhtmltopdf

pandoc -t html5 -V margin-top=3 -V margin-left=3 -V margin-right=3 -V margin-bottom=3 -V papersize=letter -s example.md -o output.pdf

(Oddly wkhtmltopdf required all margins be the same.)

Reactant

This worked (on my Mac.) But using -V margins=0.75in, for example, didn't. I needed all four options. – Geoponics

I was using a css file (with pandoc and wkhtmltopdf) and the css margins were having no effect until I set -V margin-top=0 etc for all the margins. Now I can set them all with CSS. – Vitreous

@Vitreous setting margin only in CSS doesn't work for multiple pages, CSS is not aware of page breaks – Spent

Answer 2

To answer my own question, the issue is caused by wkhtmltopdf (0.12.4) on macOS and supposedly Debian. I solved it by using only wkhtmltopdf (without Pandoc) and trying different parameters such as --zoom --dpi and --disable-smart-shrinking.

See:

wkhtmltopdf generates tiny output on Mac

https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues/3241

Saleratus