---
title: "Pandoc TXT to PDF exporting ecrm1000.tfm issues"
date: 2018-11-26T10:41:00
tags: ["formats", "linux", "snippets", "software"]
---

Recently I was experimenting with [paperless](https://github.com/danielquinn/paperless) and importing a number of files to see how the software handled things. Over the course of this experiment the only files that didn't seem to be accepted were plain txt files.

A simple solution (or so I thought) would be to convert these to PDF, and just run the import again. Pandoc is my goto choice for all types of textual documentation management, so I threw the files through the following command:

```
for i in *.txt; do pandoc "$i" -o "${i%txt}pdf"; done
```

Which helpfully gave me:
```
pdflatex not found. Please select a different --pdf-engine or install pdflatex
```
This can be remedied via:
```
sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-recommended
```
Which then nets you:
```
Error producing PDF.
! Font T1/cmr/m/n/10=ecrm1000 at 10.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found.
```

This incredibly helpful message can be resolved via:
```
sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-latex-recommended
```

Which finally produces acceptable PDF files using the very first command. Phew.