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Customizing Pandoc |
This document provides a quick overview over the various ways to customize pandoc's output, with links to fuller documentation and some examples.
Templates
When the -s/--standalone option is used, pandoc will
generate a standalone document rather than a fragment.
For example, in HTML output this will include the
<head> element; in LaTeX output, it will include the
preamble.
Pandoc comes with a default template for (almost) every output
format. A template is a plain text file containing variables
that are replaced by text generated by pandoc. For example,
the variable $body$ will be replaced by the document body,
and $title$ by the title from metadata.
To look at the default template for an output format, you can do
pandoc -D FORMAT, where FORMAT is replaced by the name of
the format. For example pandoc -D latex. You can also use your
own template instead, either by using the --template option
or by putting the custom template in your user data directory
(on Linux and macOS, ~/.pandoc/templates/).
Note that in many cases you can avoid the need for a custom
template by including a file with the --include-in-header,
--include-before-body, or --include-after-body option.
Or you can set the corresponding template variable directly.
Template variables
There are several ways to set template variables:
--variable |
--metadata |
YAML metadata and --metadata-file |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| values can be… | strings and bools | strings and bools | also YAML objects and lists |
| strings are… | inserted verbatim | escaped | interpreted as markdown |
| accessible by filters: | no | yes | yes |
For more information, see Templates in the pandoc manual.
Example: adding structured author data to HTML
TODO
Example: generating documents from YAML metadata
TODO
Reference docx/pptx/odt
For docx, pptx or odt documents, things are a bit more
complicated. Instead of a single template file, you need to
provide a customized reference.docx/pptx/odt.
See the manual for the
--reference-doc option.
Example: changing the font and line spacing in a Word docx
TODO
Filters
Templates are very powerful, but they are only a sort of scaffold to place your document's body text in. You cannot directly change the body text using the template.
If you need to affect the output of the actual body text, you can use a pandoc filter. A filter is a small program that transforms the document, between the parsing and the writing phase, while it is still in pandoc's native format. For example, a filter might find all the Header elements of a document and capitalize their text.
Pandoc's native representation of a document is an
abstract syntax tree (AST), not unlike the HTML DOM. It is
documented
here. A Pandoc document is a chunk of
metadata (Meta) and a list of Blocks. The Blocks, in
turn, are composed of other Blocks and Inline elements.
(Block elements are things like paragraphs, lists, headers,
and code blocks. Inline elements are individual words,
links, emphasis, and so on.) Filters operate on these
elements. You can use pandoc -t native to learn about the
AST's structure.
There are two kinds of filters: JSON filters (which transform a JSON serialization of the pandoc AST, and may be written in any language that can parse and emit JSON), and Lua filters (which use an interface built directly into pandoc, and must be written in the Lua language). If you are writing your own filters, it is best to use Lua filters, which are more portable (they require only pandoc itself) and more efficient. See Lua filters for documentation and examples. If you would prefer to write your filter in another language, see Filters for a gentle introduction to JSON filters.
There's a repository of lua filters at
pandoc/lua-filters
on GitHub. A number of pandoc filters, written in
Haskell, are available on
Hackage
and can be installed using the stack or cabal tools.
The wiki also lists third party
filters.
Example: capitalizing headers
TODO
Example: code extractor
TODO
Generic Divs and Spans
TODO Divs and Spans: generic blocks that can be transformed with filters
Example: colored text
Example: custom styles in docx
Raw attributes
TODO Generic raw attributes: to include raw snippets
Custom writers
TODO Custom writers
Custom syntax highlighting
TODO Custom syntax highlighting, provided by the skylighting library
including highlighting styles