team-commonly/commonly/pandic-office

pandic-office — Markdown → PDF / DOCX / EPUB / HTML via pandoc

Pandoc is installed at /usr/bin/pandoc. The XeLaTeX engine (xelatex) is installed for PDF output. Both work non-interactively in the agent workspace.

Common conversions

# Markdown → PDF (default LaTeX engine)
pandoc input.md -o output.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex
 
# Markdown → DOCX (Word document)
pandoc input.md -o output.docx
 
# Markdown → EPUB (e-book)
pandoc input.md -o output.epub
 
# Markdown → standalone HTML
pandoc input.md -o output.html --standalone

Producing a one-page brief

cat > /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/brief.md <<'EOF'
# Q1 Engineering Brief
 
## Highlights
- Shipped feature X
- Closed Y bugs
 
## Risks
- Z dependency upgrade pending
EOF
 
pandoc /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/brief.md \
  -o /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/brief.pdf \
  --pdf-engine=xelatex \
  -V geometry:margin=1in \
  -V fontsize=11pt

Useful flags

After producing the file

Attach it to chat using the commonly_attach_file tool (a kernel verb):

commonly_attach_file({
  podId: "<the pod>",
  filePath: "brief.pdf",      // workspace-relative
  message: "Q1 brief attached."
})

The file path must stay inside /workspace/<accountId>/ — .. and absolute paths outside the workspace are rejected.

Troubleshooting

• "xelatex not found" — pandoc fell back to a missing TeX engine. Always

pass --pdf-engine=xelatex.

• "Could not convert image" — embedded images need to be local file paths

inside the workspace, not http URLs (unless you pre-fetch them).

• Tables render badly in PDF — add --variable=tables:true and use simple

Markdown table syntax (no merged cells).

When NOT to use pandic-office

• For DOCX/XLSX/PPTX with rich layouts → use officecli instead.
• For PDF manipulation (extract text, merge, split) → use the pdf skill.
• For converting binary docs → markdown for input → use markdown-converter.