If no input-file is specified, input is read from stdin. Otherwise, the input-files are concatenated (with a blank line between each) and used as input. Output goes to stdout by default (though output to stdout is disabled for the odt, docx, epub, and epub3 output formats). For output to a file, use the -o option:

pandoc -o output.html input.txt

Instead of a file, an absolute URI may be given. In this case pandoc will fetch the content using HTTP:

pandoc -f html -t markdown http://www.fsf.org

If multiple input files are given, pandoc will concatenate them all (with blank lines between them) before parsing.

The format of the input and output can be specified explicitly using command-line options. The input format can be specified using the -r/--read or -f/--from options, the output format using the -w/--write or -t/--to options. Thus, to convert hello.txt from markdown to LaTeX, you could type:

pandoc -f markdown -t latex hello.txt

To convert hello.html from html to markdown:

pandoc -f html -t markdown hello.html

Supported output formats are listed below under the -t/--to option. Supported input formats are listed below under the -f/--from option. Note that the rst, textile, latex, and html readers are not complete; there are some constructs that they do not parse.

If the input or output format is not specified explicitly, pandoc will attempt to guess it from the extensions of the input and output filenames. Thus, for example,

pandoc -o hello.tex hello.txt

will convert hello.txt from markdown to LaTeX. If no output file is specified (so that output goes to stdout), or if the output file’s extension is unknown, the output format will default to HTML. If no input file is specified (so that input comes from stdin), or if the input files’ extensions are unknown, the input format will be assumed to be markdown unless explicitly specified.

Pandoc uses the UTF-8 character encoding for both input and output. If your local character encoding is not UTF-8, you should pipe input and output through iconv:

iconv -t utf-8 input.txt | pandoc | iconv -f utf-8

Earlier versions of pandoc came with a program, markdown2pdf, that used pandoc and pdflatex to produce a PDF. This is no longer needed, since pandoc can now produce pdf output itself. To produce a PDF, simply specify an output file with a .pdf extension. Pandoc will create a latex file and use pdflatex (or another engine, see --latex-engine) to convert it to PDF:

pandoc test.txt -o test.pdf

Production of a PDF requires that a LaTeX engine be installed (see --latex-engine, below), and assumes that the following LaTeX packages are available: amssymb, amsmath, ifxetex, ifluatex, listings (if the --listings option is used), fancyvrb, longtable, url, graphicx, hyperref, ulem, babel (if the lang variable is set), fontspec (if xelatex or lualatex is used as the LaTeX engine), xltxtra and xunicode (if xelatex is used).

A user who wants a drop-in replacement for Markdown.pl may create a symbolic link to the pandoc executable called hsmarkdown. When invoked under the name hsmarkdown, pandoc will behave as if invoked with -f markdown_strict --email-obfuscation=references, and all command-line options will be treated as regular arguments. However, this approach does not work under Cygwin, due to problems with its simulation of symbolic links.