Exporting RCAs
Render an incident RCA Markdown document as a shareable PDF report.
Why export an RCA?
An RCA is easiest to investigate and maintain as Markdown, but a PDF is useful when sharing a finished postmortem with stakeholders who need a stable, portable report with its tables, timelines, code blocks and evidence links.
RCAs live in each org's folder, under
~/.reckon/orgs/<org>/workspace/incidents/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<slug>/
(reckon promote creates one from a session). The exporter is a script in the
Reckon checkout; run it from there and pass the incident's path.
Export an incident folder
Pass an incident directory to select its RCA.md. The default output is
RCA.pdf in the same directory:
bash scripts/export-rca-pdf.sh ~/.reckon/orgs/acme/workspace/incidents/2026-10-14-checkout-latencyExport a Markdown document
Pass an RCA Markdown file and, optionally, an output path:
bash scripts/export-rca-pdf.sh PATH_TO_RCA_MD OPTIONAL_OUTPUT_PDFWithout an output path, the exporter writes the PDF beside the Markdown file.
An existing PDF is kept unless you add --force:
bash scripts/export-rca-pdf.sh ~/.reckon/orgs/acme/workspace/incidents/2026-10-14-checkout-latency/RCA.md --forceRendering engines
The exporter first looks for pandoc and then checks PDF engines in this
order: weasyprint, wkhtmltopdf, tectonic and xelatex. If Pandoc or all
of those engines are unavailable, it uses npx --yes md-to-pdf when Node.js
and npx are installed. If neither route is available, it prints an install
hint and exits without creating a PDF.
On macOS, install the preferred route with:
brew install pandoc weasyprintOn Debian or Ubuntu, use:
sudo apt-get install pandoc weasyprintKeep generated PDFs with their incident in the org folder, outside the Reckon checkout. Review an RCA for customer data and secrets before you share it.