This plugin allows you to have a preview in PDF of a readme file being edit from Neovim

In order to work the conversion from markdown to pdf it uses Pandoc to convert to pdf it uses pdflatex check the needed libraries in your distro repositories To display de PDF uses Zathura

Using lazy

return {
  "adalessa/markdown-preview.nvim",
  dependencies = {
    "nvim-lua/plenary.nvim",
  },
  config = true,
  ft = "markdown",
}

This plugin provides 2 commands MarkdownPreviewStart and MarkdownPreviewStop

If you take a look into the file lua/markdown-preview/init.lua it exposes 3 methods start, stop and setup

The steup function takes care of registering the user commands and allow the easy execution of the plugin.

The start function generates a new temporary file which will be use to convert the file to and will be read by Zathura. The start also registers an auto-command which every time you save the file will trigger the conversion again. Also it stores the id of the auto-command so when the stop function is call can delete the auto-command for the respective buffer

One note of the process the Zathura window is up to you to manually close it, it will not be automatically closed when the stop is executed. If you close the window but does not run the stop the conversion will be still be happening in the background.

To avoid blocks after save I use plenary async jobs which allow to run the conversion in this case and not stop the user to interact with the editor.

I run the Youtube channel Alpha Developer which I create content in Spanish and also live-stream.