pandocunofficial

Free software since 2006

Every document format, one command.

Pandoc reads about eighty document formats and writes about eighty more. Markdown into Word. LaTeX into a website. A Jupyter notebook into a book. One command-line tool, no account, no upload, nothing watching.

Latest release 3.10.1, 22 July 2026.

What using it looks like

pandoc thesis.md -o thesis.docx

a Word document, styled and paginated

pandoc thesis.md -o thesis.pdf

a typeset PDF, via LaTeX

pandoc thesis.md -t revealjs -s -o talk.html

a slide deck for the viva

Same source file, three outputs, no reformatting. Pandoc works out the formats from the file names.

Step one

Install it

Pick your platform for the one-line route, with the alternatives behind it if you'd rather use a package manager you already have.

Homebrewrecommended

brew install pandoc

Want PDFs? PDFs go through LaTeX. A full MacTeX is about four gigabytes, so pandoc recommends BasicTeX or TinyTeX instead: brew install --cask basictex.

Other ways to install on macOS

MacPorts

port install pandoc

Installer package

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/latest

A .pkg for Apple silicon or Intel, straight from the release page.

Conda forge

conda install -c conda-forge pandoc

wingetrecommended

winget install --source winget --exact --id JohnMacFarlane.Pandoc

Want PDFs? PDFs go through LaTeX. Pandoc recommends MiKTeX: choco install miktex.

Other ways to install on Windows

Chocolatey

choco install pandoc

MSI installer

https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/latest

Replaces older versions and puts pandoc on your PATH.

Conda forge

conda install -c conda-forge pandoc

Your package managerrecommended

sudo apt install pandoc

Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, NixOS, openSUSE, Gentoo, Void and Slackware all package it — but check the version first, since distro packages are often well behind.

Want PDFs? PDFs go through LaTeX. Pandoc recommends TeX Live via your package manager: sudo apt install texlive.

Other ways to install on Linux

Official .deb

sudo dpkg -i pandoc-<version>-1-amd64.deb

Statically linked, no dynamic dependencies. amd64 and arm64 builds are on the release page.

Tarball, into a prefix you choose

tar xvzf pandoc-<version>-linux-amd64.tar.gz --strip-components 1 -C ~/.local

Conda forge

conda install -c conda-forge pandoc

Official imagerecommended

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/data" pandoc/core README.md -o README.html

Nothing to install. Mount the directory you're converting as /data.

Want PDFs? Use the pandoc/latex image rather than pandoc/core; the core image has no TeX and PDF output will fail.

Other ways to install on Docker

With LaTeX, for PDFs

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/data" pandoc/latex README.md -o README.pdf

pandoc/latex carries the minimal TeX install PDF output needs.

Dockerfiles and tags

https://github.com/pandoc/dockerfiles

The binaries pandoc ships (and the Conda Forge builds) are statically linked, which means they can't load Lua filters that depend on C modules. If you need those, install from source or from your distro.

Every route pandoc documents, including Chrome OS, the BSDs and compiling from source, is on their installing page.

Step two

Get your command

Say what you have and what you want. You get the command, and the thing that catches people out the first time they run it.

pandoc input.md -o output.docx

Watch out: The output uses pandoc's default styles, not your organisation's. Point it at any .docx whose styles you like and it will use those instead.

With your own styles

pandoc input.md --reference-doc=house-style.docx -o output.docx

All 88 formats are in these lists. The ones people actually ask for are under Most used at the top; the rest are grouped below, the same way the full table groups them.

Or don't install anything

Try it here, right now

Pandoc has an official WebAssembly build, so the converter below is pandoc itself running in this tab — not a demonstration of one. Paste a document in and watch it come out the other side.

This runs pandoc itself — the real binary, compiled to WebAssembly — inside this tab. Nothing you type is uploaded, because there's nowhere for it to go.

It's a 15MB download the first time, so it's not fetched until you ask for it. On mobile data you may want to wait.

Then

Where to go next

  • Every format

    All eighty-odd, and which direction each one travels. Some pandoc only reads, some it only writes; the difference matters before you plan a pipeline around it.

  • Worked examples

    Real commands against a real document, each with the output file to open. Slide decks, ebooks, papers with citations.

  • The manual

    Pandoc's own reference, and genuinely good: every flag, every Markdown extension, every template variable. Long, but searchable.

  • Filters

    Pandoc parses to an abstract syntax tree, and a filter rewrites that tree in Lua before it's written out. This is where it stops being a converter and starts being a toolkit.

What it is

One tool instead of forty converters

Most format converters are point-to-point: Markdown to HTML, LaTeX to PDF, one pair each. Pandoc doesn't work that way. It parses whatever you give it into a single internal representation of a document — headings, emphasis, citations, tables, as structure rather than as syntax — and then writes that structure out in whichever format you asked for.

That one decision is what the rest follows from. Every reader pandoc gains works with every writer it already had, so the useful combinations multiply rather than add. It's also why the conversions it can't do cleanly are the ones where the structure genuinely isn't there to carry across, which is a much easier thing to reason about than a matrix of special cases.

In practice people reach for it to write once and submit in whatever shape is demanded — a thesis in Markdown that has to arrive as.docx, a paper whose citations come from a BibTeX file and need to come out in whatever style the journal wants, a set of notes that should be a slide deck by Thursday. It runs locally as a single binary with no account and no upload, which is why it's ended up underneath a great deal of academic and technical publishing.

It's free software, maintained since 2006 by John MacFarlane with hundreds of contributors, and documented in exhaustive detail at pandoc.org.