Install Pandoc (required for docverter)

You can install directly from the repos:

sudo apt-get install pandoc

I found that installing cabal took up a lot of disk space in my VM, so I prefer to use the deb that the pandoc developers provide. Here's what I do to download and install the current deb (for pandoc v15.1.1):

sudo wget https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/download/1.15.1/pandoc-1.15.1-1-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i pandoc-1.15.1-1-amd64.deb

You can check the latest release numbers here: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/

As pointed out by Stephane Laurent, the version of pandoc in the repos is far from the newest and doesn't allow nice features such as handling citations with --biblio. I struggled to install the newest version using the instructions on the pandoc website and github but here's how I finally did it for Ubuntu 13.10.

1. Install cabal

   sudo apt-get install cabal-install
   

2. Update cabal package database

   cabal update
   

3. Make sure that path to cabal is at start of PATH (tip from here)

   PATH=$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH
   

4. Use cabal to install alex and happy

   cabal install alex happy
   

5. Use cabal to install pandoc (and pandoc-citeproc if wanted)

   cabal install pandoc pandoc-citeproc
   

6. Check pandoc version to confirm installed

   pandoc --version
   

You'll need to add the PATH=$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH command to your ~/.profile so it's available on your next restart. Happy converting!

I had similar issues trying to install pandoc on a 512 MB machine in the clouds. According to a comment for this question I was getting the ExitFailure 9 because GHC was receiving a SIGKILL because I was using too much memory. To me this explained the lack of any useful messages with verbose switched on. I turned off ghc optimizations by installing with cabal-dev install pandoc --ghc-options="-O0" and pandoc compiled fine with a far smaller memory footprint. This is not a smart idea if you are in a production environment though!