easiest markdown to PDF conversion

[David Sanson]

I assume MMD composer offers a built-in way to do this, but I'm not a user, so I'm not sure.

[pandoc] should work with the [BasicTeX] install, which is much smaller than the full MacTeX install. It used to be a bit of a pain to install pandoc, but there is now a simple Mac installer, so that is no longer an issue.

If you want to avoid the terminal, I know of a few good options, but they all require being familiar enough to write a one-line shell script wrapper calling your favorite converter. One is to use [platypus] to make a drag and drop applet that wraps around a one-line shell script calling pandoc. Another would be to use Automator to do the same thing. With Automator, you can also create a system service that calls a shell script---I used to have some of these cooked up for use with WriteRoom, and they worked fine. If you want, I could try to dig them up and post them somewhere.

If you don't use the terminal much, you probably don't use an advanced text editor like TextMate, Emacs, or Vim. If you do, there are good plugins for MMD and Pandoc for all three (the TextMate plugin for pandoc is a bit out of date, I'm afraid) that make conversion to PDF just a keystroke away, without having to mess around in the terminal.

Best,
David

[pandoc]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
[BasicTeX]: http://www.tug.org/mactex/2011/morepackages.html
[platypus]: http://sveinbjorn.org/platypus