Docker container with Pandoc, PdfTex, and image-conversion tools installed

A Docker image based on Ubuntu 20.04, with software installed including:

• Pandoc
• LaTeX
• xcftools
• Inkscape
• Pweave
• ImageMagick
• Librsvg
• LibreOffice Writer
• Poppler utils

Building multiplatform images locally

To support Apple Silicon (arm64) and other platforms, we use Docker's buildx with QEMU for emulation. Instructions for setup on your development machine follow (assumes Ubuntu >= 20.04 and Docker is already installed).

1. Install QEMU

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y qemu-user-static

Provides the necessary emulators so you can build arm64 images on an amd64 machine.

2. Enable experimental Docker CLI features (if needed)

Ensure Docker CLI experimental features are enabled:

mkdir -p ~/.docker
echo '{ "experimental": "enabled" }' > ~/.docker/config.json

(Often unnecessary with recent Docker versions, but can help avoid warnings.)

3. Set up a named buildx builder

We recommend creating a named builder to avoid interfering with your default Docker setup.

docker buildx create --name multiarch-builder

To list available builders and see their status:

docker buildx ls

Once created, you can explicitly use this builder for multi-platform builds without setting it as the default:

docker buildx build --builder=multiarch-builder --platform=linux/amd64,linux/arm64 -t yourimage:tag .

Add --push if you're building for multiple platforms and want to push to a remote registry. Without --push, you can only export a single-platform image to the local Docker daemon using --load.

4. Optional: Bootstrapping the builder (usually automatic)

If the builder isn't already bootstrapped (you’ll see a warning when building), you can do:

docker buildx inspect multiarch-builder --bootstrap

Using the builder

Once this setup is done, you can build multi-platform images like so:

docker buildx build \
  --builder=multiarch-builder \
  --platform=linux/amd64,linux/arm64 \
  -t yourdockerhubuser/yourimage:dev \
  .

Or push directly to your registry:

docker buildx build \
  --builder=multiarch-builder \
  --platform=linux/amd64,linux/arm64 \
  -t ghcr.io/yourorg/yourimage:dev \
  --push \
  .

With recent versions of Docker, you can test images by specifying a platform to run on, e.g.

docker -D run --rm -it \
		--platform linux/arm64 adstewart/pandoc:0.7

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Credits

Adapted from (inter alia) Jan Philip Bernius's docker-pandoc, https://github.com/jpbernius/docker-pandoc.