Have you checked out Madoko?

https://www.madoko.net

> Madoko is a fast markdown processor for writing professional articles, books, manuals, webpages and presentations, with a focus on simplicity and plain text readability.

> With Madoko you can write complex documents completely in markdown and get beautiful PDF and HTML output.

It's unfortunate that their front page has broken layout.

"Madoko = LATEX x Markd"

MD->HTML->PDF. Just use a browser to render your document. You can make the process a bit more automated by using something like Chrome Headless. I'm sure there's a project out there that does this all in one step from the commandline.

My setup:

1) I have cmark installed

2) https://github.com/nathanl/.dotfiles/blob/master/bin/md_prev... is a script to render STDIN to HTML and slap the output into the middle of a template that has some basic CSS (https://github.com/nathanl/.dotfiles/blob/master/bin/md_prev...)

3) I write markdown in Vim and use keybindings to say "now output HTML from this buffer" - https://github.com/nathanl/.dotfiles/blob/ede8c98a7897ee07b7...

I like this mainly because it lets me use Vim, which for me is the most efficient tool for wrangling text. I also like avoiding WISYWIG programs that I previously fought with - eg, trying to get Word to understand which bullet points I wanted nested under which other ones was frustrating, but with markdown (and embedded HTML when necessary) I can be 100% explicit.

Sometimes I copy-paste the resulting HTML into Google Docs or elsewhere and do further tweaks, but most of the time it's enough for me as-is.

This approach is what I have sometimes been using. It works OK and I can style my documents with CSS. But there are little things that bug me, like headlines on the last line of page N and the paragraph starting on page N+1 and header/footer lines generated by the browser.

for what it's worth you can define pagebreaks with css [0]. it's not the most user-friendly way, but works. the @page rule also comes in quite handy

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/page-break-...

I'm definitely late to the party, but I've used Markdown, CSS, and Weasyprint to make some attractive PDF files (including my resumé, so I put my money where my mouth is). It lets me style things as I like without much extra work, and since Markdown produces simple, predictable HTML, I can keep a library of styles that I can apply to any document.

What is your gold standard here? I can only assume you're comparing to hand-written LaTeX. But if that is a feasible option for you then you might as well stick with it. Using something simple like markdown is really a compromise for non-TeXnical-typists.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "looked horrible". I've found some of the MD to PDF plug-ins for Atom were acceptable for short documents. For bigger ones, I'd probably want more control over formatting, and would go via pandoc.

I use asciidoc (via asciidoctor), which is based on Docbook and therefore supports a lot more complex document features. Its PDF export is quite excellent IMO, and doesn't require LaTeX (though it can go through LaTeX).