Pandocker 21.02: Major upgrade

Paris, March 1rst, 2021

What is this ?

Pandocker is a docker image containing a complete document production toolchain
based on pandoc with filters, templates, fonts, and the latex bazaar

It allows you to generate slides and documents without installing the required
depencies on your machine. It is also very usefull to integrate pandoc into
a CI workflow such as Github Actions, Gitlab Pipelines, etc.

For instance to generate an EPUB file from a markdown source, you can simply
type:

docker run --rm -v `pwd`:/pandoc dalibo/pandocker test.md -o test.epub

This image is available under BSD Licence and it has 2 main tags:

• stable should be used in production
• stable-full for non-european languages
• latest and latest-full are the development versions

You can also retrieve older versions by their version number:
dalibo/pandocker:19.11, dalibo/pandocker:21.02-full, etc.

For more details :

• Github : https://github.com/dalibo/pandocker
• Docker Hub : https://hub.docker.com/r/dalibo/pandocker/

Major Upgrades

This new version is now based on Debian 10 buster (instead of Stretch) with
pandoc 2.11 and the version 2.0 of the eisvogel template. We have done careful
regression tests but these changes may introduce minor changes in the rendered
output of your documents. Please open a ticket if you notice a problematic
behaviour.

Support for Arabic, Persian, Hindi and CJK languages

The docker image has now a new variant named full that will included
non-european fonts, especially the complete Noto font. This font family is
designed to support all languages.

We also included latex font packages such as devanagari for Hindi and
farsiweb for Persian. Right-to-Left typesetting is also supported.

To use these fonts, you can simply define the mainfont variable inside the
markdown front-matter or via the pandoc command line with the -v (or
--variable option) :

docker run [...] dalibo/pandocker [...] hindi.md -o hindi.pdf -v mainfont='Lohit Devanagari'

For Noto:

docker run [...] dalibo/pandocker [...] foo.md -o foo.pdf -v mainfont='Noto Sans'

IMPORTANT: The full docker image size is approx. 800MB whereas the regular
is "only" 320 MB. We recommend that you use the full variant only when needed
and prefer the regular variant for basic use cases.

The support for Hindi and Persian was sponsored by the OWASP Foundation. Many
thanks to them ! Many thanks also to @iapellaniz and @vvishnyakov who contributed
to the release.

How to upgrade

docker pull dalibo/pandocker:stable

How to contribute

Pandocker is an open project, contributions are welcome.

If you want to help, you can find a list of "Junior Jobs" here:

Junior Job