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We have started responding to many documents now using plain text files since it is very easy to manage and to collaborate with other team members. Now, what if you want to send off a professional looking formatted structured document with a table of contents. You also want it to be in a common format so that others can annotate on it or send you feedback. PDF is perfect for this, but how do you get your very functional markdown to a very pretty PDF presentation?

Markdown.pl ~/Desktop/mytextfile.markdown | SmartyPants.pl | htmldoc --book --footer . -f output.pdf -

Enjoy! As a bonus I included SmartyPants, which is also by the creator of Markdown and it gives you some nice typographical elements just as smart quotes and em-dashes. Also, I would check out the documentation on htmldoc, it is pretty powerful and can even embed background images and custom headers and footers.