I'm starting to write another report for University, and unlike other reports, this one apparently has to be a rather specific format. To that end, I've got two choices, apparently: Use the provided Word / LibreOffice template, or use a LaTeX template instead. After the trouble and frustration I had with LibreOffice for my previous report, I've naturally decided that using the LaTeX template might be a good idea.

After downloading it, I ended up doing some research and troubleshooting to get it to render properly to a PDF. Now that I've figured it out, I thought I'd share it here for anyone else who ends up experiencing difficulties or is unsure on how it's done.

The way I'm going to be using it is with a tool called Pandoc. First, install it like so:

sudo apt install pandoc texlive-fonts-recommended

Adjust as necessary for your distribution - Windows users will need to read the download instructions. The texlive-font-recommended package is ~66MiB(!), but it contains a bunch of fonts that are needed when you're rendering LaTeX documents, apparently.

With the dependencies installed, here's the command to convert a LaTeX document to a PDF:

pandoc -s input.tex -o output.pdf

Replace index.tex with the path to your input file, and output.pdf with the desired path to the output file. I haven't figured out how to set the font to sans-serif yet, but I'll probably make another post about it when I do.

Found this helpful? Still having issues? Let me know below! I don't have analytics on here, so that's the only way I'll know if anyone reads this :-)

Sources and Further Reading

• The LaTeX Project
• Pandoc
• Pandoc LaTeX -> PDF font issue