pandoc-convert

What This Skill Does

The pandoc-convert skill serves as a professional-grade document orchestration agent for OpenClaw. It abstracts the complexity of the powerful pandoc CLI into a user-friendly interface that handles complex format transformations with ease. Whether you are migrating legacy Word documents to clean Markdown for version control, compiling technical reports into polished PDFs, or generating accessible EPUBs, this skill manages the underlying dependencies, templates, and flags. By integrating both a versatile Python controller and optimized shell scripts, the skill ensures high-fidelity results, including metadata preservation and custom styling via built-in academic and business templates.

Installation

Installation is managed directly through the OpenClaw ecosystem. Run the command 'clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/thejorgeschmidt/pandoc-convert-openclaw' in your terminal. Note that this skill requires the pandoc binary (v2.19+) to be present on your system path. For generating PDFs, ensure a LaTeX distribution (such as TeX Live or MiKTeX) is configured. You can verify your environment by checking for 'pandoc --version' and 'python3 --version' before initiating your first conversion task.

Use Cases

• Documentation Engineering: Converting internal research notes written in Markdown into structured PDF reports with tables of contents.
• Content Portability: Transforming Word documents or Google Doc exports into clean, version-control-ready Markdown files for GitHub/GitLab.
• Publishing: Compiling multiple Markdown chapters into a standardized EPUB or PDF book layout with custom CSS or LaTeX templates.
• Batch Processing: Automating the conversion of hundreds of site pages or technical manuals from outdated legacy formats into modern HTML or static site generator formats.

Example Prompts

1. 'Convert my manual.docx into a clean markdown file and ensure all images are extracted into a local /media folder.'
2. 'Compile all Markdown files in the ./docs folder into a single PDF report using the business template, including a table of contents.'
3. 'Transform this project-plan.md into an EPUB file for my e-reader, ensuring the metadata includes the correct title and author information.'

Tips & Limitations

When dealing with complex Word documents, remember that pandoc performs best with structured heading styles. For PDF generation, if your document contains heavy custom LaTeX, ensure your environment variables are correctly mapped. Always use the validation scripts provided in the skill to verify output integrity for EPUB files. The skill performs file system operations, so ensure you have sufficient permissions for read/write access in your working directories. Large batch conversions may take time depending on the system's LaTeX rendering speed.