PDF output

[Fosters]

Markdown speaks to a project I've engaged for nearly a decade. Ever  
since I cobbled up an Apple Newton keyboard to connect to my Pilot  
5000, I wanted to type plain text with formatting for later printing.  
Class notes and such. Once I wrote a complex WordPerfect script using  
custom markup. For a while I wrote raw TeX, relying on a macro file to  
simplify things only a little.

Upon examining the output of Markdown and noting the very small set of  
tags, I thought it might lend itself naturally to this project. The  
result is a crude shell script that uses Markdown, SmartyPants and  
tetex (specifically, pdfetex) to generate a pdf file from a Markdown  
file.

At present the script does not support images and its URL handling is  
pretty crude. I don't even try to do anything with obscured e-mail  
links.

I also deviate from Markdown by:
	- leaving the plain TeX page numbers
	- using letters and roman numerals for the second & third nested  
ordered lists
	- allowing html comments to pass TeX code by delimiting with the token  
"TeX":
		<!--TeX \eject TeX-->

This may be pretty far outside the scope of Markdown. Especially the  
inclusion of TeX commands which could be used to give hints, but also  
is subject to heavy use (=abuse). Nonetheless I submit the following  
script for your amusement. The following URL should be available for  
approximately seven days (until 29 June 2006). I invite comments and  
improvements.

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php? 
action=download&ufid=A18650072B667485

The file you download should be called "md2pdf".

--Todd