Trying to decode exported chatpdf conversations in markdown+latex to pdf

[cn2015b]

I hope you are fine.

I have discovered chatpdf.com days ago and I wish to decode the chat conversations with chatpdf to any format that can be well rendered in a editor when you select to export them.

Chatpdf let me to export the chat conversations to a text output that is some kind of markdown with latex formulas embedded, but it is not well compiled by pandoc, or I don´t know how to do it well nor it can be rendered with any editor.

Some of the commands I have tried:

pandoc -o chat.pdf input.md
pandoc -o chat.tex input.md

Output of the first command:

Error producing PDF.
! Missing $ inserted.
<inserted text>
                $
l.281     {[} EOQ = \sqrt{

I have read that the issue maybe spaces, backreturns or similar…
And I have no experience in pandoc and latex but I tried it and maybe pandoc doesn´t parse well the formulas, moving backslashes to Brackets in the original formulas like this:

\[
EOQ = \sqrt{\frac{2DS}{H}}
\]

to:

{[} EOQ = \sqrt{\frac{2DS}{H}} {]}

, like I can see in the chat.tex output, of the second command...

Editors like Typora doesn´t render the formulas. This editor supports markdown with latex but have the same issue. It shows the formulas with brackets instead backslash, and no render it...

I have tried it in MX Linux (Debian) with texlive-base, pandoc and several editors with the same issue that Windows 10 with MiKTeX, Typora and TexWorks and pandoc.

In Summary, maybe the issue be:

• the format setted up or detected by pandoc and editors is not right and not parse.
• there is needing to code some template or filter in pandoc to parse well this strange chat format...
• Some other kind of parsing issue...?

Please help!.

[jgm]

It's impossible to help without seeing a sample of the source you are trying to parse; we can't reconstruct that just from an error message.

[cn2015b]

The complete source example I am trying to compile is:

### Título

Esto es un texto normal.

La formula en linea es: \( E = mc^2 \)

La formula en bloque es:

\[
EOQ = \sqrt{\frac{2DS}{H}}
\]

Mas texto.

Sorry by the spanish text....
The missing header and footer for latex documents should not be a problem, the chatpdf exported file have not, it is some kind of markdown + latex formulas format...
However I have tried to apply the following template to add latex header and footer.

template8.tex:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{amssymb}

\begin{document}

$body$

\end{document}

with the command

pandoc -o chat.tex input.md --template=template8.tex

, returning one more time the described error

I am using Notepad++ for ensuring utf8 encoding, but I don´t know if could have an issue with rare characters...

Thanks for the support.

[jgm]

You want: pandoc -o chat.tex input.md -f markdown+tex_math_single_backslash
(see the manual for what that extension does).

[cn2015b]

All right, my test file compile to tex and pdf and renders correctly although it is nedded to add the --template=template8.tex in the given command to introduce the latex header and footer to parse well. So the command is:

pandoc -o chat.pdf input.md -f markdown+tex_math_single_backslash --template=template8.tex

But then I have tried to compile a complete Chatpdf exported file with more things than the test and I find this error with tight lists:

Error producing PDF.
! Undefined control sequence.
l.46   \tightlist

A sample of tight lists in that exported file is:

...
\begin{itemize}
  \tightlist
  \item
    explanation one
  \item
    explanation two
  \end{itemize}
...

I made a research and this error with tigh lists seems to be related to the default templates. I believed that my pandoc was updated but... maybe not the templates ?.

If I modify my template8.tex file and add a empty macro definition for \tightlist, so:

\def\tightlist{}

, or alternatively as indicated in https://github.com/jgm/pandoc-templates/blob/master/default.latex.orig

\providecommand{\tightlist}{%
  \setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}\setlength{\parskip}{0pt}}

...it renders, but this is a patch!.

Please, could you instruct me in why of this issue and in how to update the templates in my pandoc instalation for windows 10?. This could be a robust solution and fix more future issues.

Thanks!

[jgm]

If you use a custom template, it's best to start by modifying pandoc's own default template, which defines some things (like \tightlist) that are needed by pandoc's output. pandoc -D latex will print this for you. See the manual for more.