(I *did* search the web for two hours...)

It shouldn't be that difficult to get started with pandoc, right? Well it is. I tried the progit example and TeX says that it cannot find font Helvetica. I tried another example from the web and TeX says it cannot find font Palatino. I've installed texlive-full on Fedora (that's 4 GB and specifically inludes a package "texlive-palatino"). 

Do I really have to understand all about TeX fonts before using pandoc? From my google results (barely understandable to the uninitiated), this looks like a several week's effort. That's about the time I wanted to spend on the document. Am I too stupid and should simply stick to LibreOffice?