- want your final output to be in HTML;
- want the HTML to be styled with CSS;
- and want the HTML document to be truly standalone;
- It doesn’t have to be called that, by the way.↩
Tip: using Pandoc to create truly standalone HTML files
If you’re using the excellent Pandoc to convert between different document formats, and you:
then read on.
The most common approach with Pandoc is, I think, to write in Markdown, and then convert the output to RTF, PDF or HTML. There are all sorts of more advanced options too; but here we are only concerned with HTML.
The pandoc
command has an option which allows you to style the resulting HTML with CSS. Example 3 in the User’s Guide shows how you do this, with the -c
option. The example also uses the -s
option, which means that we are creating a standalone HTML document, as distinct from a fragment that is to be embedded in another document. The full command is:
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If you inspect the generated HTML file after running this, you will see it contains a line like this:
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That links to the CSS stylesheet, keeping the formatting information separate from the content. Very good practice if you’re publishing a document on the web.
But what about that “standalone” idea that you expressed with the -s
option? What that does is make sure that the HTML is a complete document, beginning with a DOCTYPE
tag, an <html>
tag, and so on. But if, for example, you have to email the document you just created, or upload it to your company’s document store, then things fall apart. When your reader opens it, they’ll see what you wrote, all right; but it won’t be styled the way you wanted it. Because that pandoc.css
file with the styling is back on your machine, in the same directory as the original Markdown file.
What you really want is to use embedded CSS; you want the content of pandoc.css
to be included along with the prose you wrote in your HTML file.
Luckily HTML supports that, and Pandoc provides a way to make it all happen: the -H
option, or using its long form, –include-in-header=FILE
First you’ll have to make sure that your pandoc.css
file1 starts and ends with HTML <style>
tags, so it should look something like this:
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Then run the pandoc
command like this:
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and you’re done. A fully standalone HTML document.