Skim, LibreOffice, and Pandoc

Overview

Skim, LibreOffice, and Pandoc are three open-source tools to handle text files.

Skim

Skim is an open-source PDF viewer. The reason I recommend it is that it supports real-time refresh. With this feature, you can quickly preview the target translated PDF file.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. On top of that, it supports command-line operations. You can use it to convert docs to another format with a single command (prefixed with soffice).

Pandoc

Pandoc is used to convert files into another formats from the command line. To see the formats supported, see pandoc.

Installing Pandoc

To install pandoc on Mac, run:

brew install pandoc

Converting file formats

To convert a file into another format:

pandoc -s "file to convert including path" -o "[converted file including path]" 

# Example: convert from markdown to pdf
pandoc -s source.md -o target.pdf

For more information, see Installing pandoc.

Known issues

Pandoc doesn't support Chinese characters

By default, Pandoc doesn't support Chinese characters. As a result, if you convert a markdown file that contains Chinese characters, the pandoc command will report an error similar to the following one:

Error producing PDF.
! LaTeX Error: Unicode character 简 (U+7B80)
               not set up for use with LaTeX.

In this case, you can use the following workaround:

1. Install LaTex on your computer.

2. In the beginning of your markdown file, specify a font that supports Chinese characters. In the example below, I use Source Han Sans CN:

   ---
   CJKmainfont: Source Han Sans CN
   ---

3. Add the --pdf-engine option to your pandoc command:

   pandoc -s source.md -o target.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex

After this, you should be able to convert Chinese files properly.

信息

Instead of modifying the markdown files (step 2), you can also specify the font in the command as follows:

pandoc -s source.md -o target.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex -V CJKmainfont="Source Han Sans CN""

For more other possibilities, see this stack overflow answer.