F# – PDF fun with Markdown and FSharp.Formatting

I spent the last couple of nights putting together a simple Markdown to PDF formatter using Tomas Petricek’s FSharp.Formatting project and the PdfSharp-MigraDoc library.

To use this library, you can either grab the source from the GitHub repository or get it from Nuget using the following command:

F# Usage

To use the library from F#, you can use the Markdown type defined in the FSharp.Markdown namespace (from the FSharp.Formating library), once you’ve opened the FSharp.Markdown.Pdf namespace you’ll have access to two static extension methods:

• TransformPdf – accepts a string as input and outputs the resulting PDF to a local file path or to a specified Stream.
• WritePdf – accepts a MarkdownDocument generated by the Markdown.Parse method, and outputs the resulting PDF to a local file path or to a specified Stream.

C# Usage

You can also use this library from C#, however, the static extension methods mentioned above is not accessible in C# because type extensions defined in F# are compiled differently to standard extension methods you find in C# (with far more possibilities I might add, such as extension properties, and static methods, for instance!) and is not recognized by the C# compiler..

You can still access the same functionalities using a MarkdownPdf type, with two static methods:

• Transform – equivalent to Markdown.TransformPdf.
• Write – equivalent to Markdown.WritePdf.

You can see an example output here with the corresponding Markdown here.