Pandoc TXT to PDF exporting ecrm1000.tfm issues

Recently I was experimenting with 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.