I've created a similar template in the past for my university stuff. You might want to check it out, maybe there are some things you can reuse for your own purpose.

https://github.com/W4RH4WK/dogx

Example: https://w4rh4wk.github.io/M.Sc.-Thesis/output/thesis.html (7.6 MB standalone)

Seems like a good thread to ask for suggestions: I've been looking for a CSS-stylesheet that can be applied to HTML against tools that render PDFs (such as xhtml2pdf / wkhtml2pdf etc) to produce pandoc-like PDFs. All CSS stylesheets in this regard are focused on the "web" side of rendering obviously, and while tools like xhtml2pdf provide additional CSS classes for special handling of PDF components, I haven't found any templates for the same.

Maybe HTML-Sheets-of-Paper[1][2] is for you?

There used to be a package named Markdown-themeable-pdf, which could turn unruly todos and html into corporate, paginated Documents with metric margins to go. That was back when Atom still had an ecosystem, but it's archived over here[2]. An example:

https://github.com/cakebake/markdown-themeable-pdf/blob/mast...

[1]: https://github.com/delight-im/HTML-Sheets-of-Paper

[2]: https://github.com/cakebake/markdown-themeable-pdf

This is helpful, thanks.

Are you unhappy with pandoc html input?

can't use pandoc because the PDF output for pandoc requires tex, and asking end-users to install tex properly is a tough call for the usecase (https://github.com/captn3m0/pystitcher)

This is cool. I have been playing around with simplifying my Note Taking, Writing, and moving towards a Plain Text Life. I've found Pandoc to be an extremely powerful tool. I write Markdown keeping it closer to a plain text so a human can parse without building it.

I did tamed Jekyll to a degree but then realized that Pandoc is going to be the ultimate weapon.

Thanks for this. This is super nice.

I have zero experience with CSS; something I've really enjoyed in similar themes that the section being viewed is highlighted in the floating table of contents (so when you scroll down it bolds from one section to the next). Is that something that can be implemented in CSS or does it need scripting?

You may have already guessed the answer is "no" due to the lack of replies. The issue is the CSS doesn't know what part of the page is within the viewport. Another issue is a table of contents should be in the page before the contents themselves and you generally can't change style of an element based on the state of a later element (I qualify it with "generally" because there are some possibilities with the newish :focus-within pseudoclass).

This is a really helpful and generous reply, thank you!

This work was a supernatural fit for Typora, the pandoc enabled markdown editor. Thank you!