Title	The Paper Project
Author	Sahu, S

Paper is the truest form of a document, physical, permanent, and universally readable. 'The Paper Project' brings together Markdown and LaTeX with diagrams, formulae, and rich formatting and renders the result as a PDF.

Overview

paper takes a Markdown file and renders it as a styled PDF via a Docker container. It handles:

• Custom LaTeX template with section-aware headers and page numbers
• Emoji rendering (unicode → SVG via twemoji)
• Mermaid diagrams (rendered via headless Chrome)
• Toggles for page numbers and section page breaks

Requirements

• Docker

Installation

Clone the repo and build the Docker image:

git clone <repo-url> $HOME/paper
cd $HOME/paper
docker build -t paper:latest .

Then symlink the paper script into a directory on your $PATH:

ln -sf $HOME/paper/paper $HOME/.local/bin/paper

Usage

paper <file.md> [options]

Option	Description
--pages=yes	Show page numbers (default)
--pages=no	Hide page numbers
--continuous	No page break between sections
-o, --output <file.pdf>	Write PDF to this path (default: temp dir, opened automatically)
-v, --verbose	Print commands as they run

After the PDF is generated it opens automatically. You are then prompted whether to keep or delete it.

Examples

# Basic
paper report.md

# No page numbers
paper report.md --pages=no

# No section breaks, no page numbers
paper report.md --continuous --pages=no

# Save PDF to a specific path
paper report.md -o ~/Documents/report.pdf

Mermaid diagrams

Mermaid code blocks are rendered as diagrams in the PDF.

```mermaid
graph TD
    A[Write Markdown] --> B[Run paper]
    B --> C{Success?}
    C -- Yes --> D[Open PDF]
    C -- No --> E[Fix errors]
    E --> B
```

sequenceDiagram
    participant Author
    participant paper
    participant pandoc
    participant LaTeX

    Author->>paper: paper report.md
    paper->>pandoc: pandoc report.md --template ...
    pandoc->>LaTeX: compiled .tex
    LaTeX-->>Author: report.pdf

Loading

Front matter variables

Set these in your document's YAML front matter to control layout:

---
title: My Report
author: Your Name
date: 2026-06-13
continuous-pages: true   # no page breaks between sections
no-page-numbers: true    # hide page numbers
---

Acknowledgements

src/emoji-filter.js is based on work by Miguel Angelo, originally licensed under the Apache License 2.0. It converts unicode emoji in Markdown to SVG images (via twemoji or noto-emoji) so they render correctly in the PDF output.

src/pandoc-emoji-filter.js is derived from masbicudo/Pandoc-Emojis-Filter, modified to suit this project. It preprocesses Markdown by replacing unicode emoji with local SVG image references before the document is passed to pandoc.