md2pdf

What This Skill Does

The md2pdf skill is a specialized utility designed for OpenClaw agents to bridge the gap between structured Markdown documentation and high-quality, professional PDF reports. Unlike simple HTML-to-PDF converters, this skill leverages Pandoc and XeLaTeX to provide enterprise-grade typesetting. It is specifically optimized to handle complex academic or technical requirements, including native LaTeX mathematical rendering, which is essential for scientists, engineers, and researchers. Furthermore, it incorporates robust support for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, ensuring that multilingual documents are rendered correctly without the character replacement errors often found in standard converters. By automating the configuration of fonts, page margins, and table of contents generation, it allows users to focus on content creation rather than technical formatting.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, run the following installation command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/huaruoji/md2pdf-xelatex

Note that this skill relies on external system dependencies. You must ensure that your system has Pandoc and the XeLaTeX distribution installed. On Debian-based systems, use: sudo apt install pandoc texlive-xetex texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-extra texlive-latex-extra texlive-lang-chinese.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for generating technical documentation, converting research papers written in Markdown to submission-ready PDFs, exporting project notes with embedded formulas, and producing standardized reports that require multi-language support. It is particularly useful for teams collaborating on international projects where both source code/Markdown files and readable documentation are required.

Example Prompts

1. "Convert my notes.md file into a professional PDF report, making sure to render the math equations properly."
2. "I have a documentation file with mixed English and Chinese content. Can you export this to a PDF so I can share it with the team?"
3. "Please generate a printable PDF from this markdown, including a table of contents and a clean, standard layout."

Tips & Limitations

To get the best results, use standard $...$ and $$...$$ syntax for math rather than custom HTML tags. The tool automatically handles emoji by stripping or replacing them to avoid LaTeX rendering errors. For complex data presentation, stick to simple tables as the XeLaTeX engine can struggle with highly nested structures. If you experience missing characters, verify your local font library with fc-list :lang=zh. Always ensure your source Markdown uses standard formatting to prevent unexpected behavior during the conversion phase.