Pandoc is a great document converter. Latex/Xetex is a great typesetting system. Unfortunately, installing the above can be tricky.

This image is setup to build PDF sideshows from Markdown source.

Pull down the image with:

docker pull vpetro/pandoc

Note that on OS X this only works with the latest version of Docker for Mac. If you are using Virtualbox/docker-machine based setup, to use this you will have to upgrade or use the second method below.

Go into the directory that contains the Markdown source for the PDF presentation and run:

docker run -d -v `pwd`:/slides vpetro/pandoc

The above will create the container that watches the current directory for changes to Markdown files. Pandoc will run any time there is a change to a Markdown file in the current directory.

Alternatively, the image can be used a big Pandoc executable to be run at will. Assuming you have a file named document.md in the current directory, the following command will produce a PDF version of the Markdown document.

docker run -v `pwd`:/slides pandoc pandoc /slides/document.md --latex-engine=xelatex -o document.pdf

or

 docker run -v `pwd`:/slides vpetro/pandoc:latest pandoc /slides/slides.md --latex-engine xelatex -o /slides/slides.pdf