pandoc/doc/custom-writers.md

author	date	title
John MacFarlane	November 21, 2021	Creating Custom Pandoc Writers in Lua

Introduction

If you need to render a format not already handled by pandoc, or you want to change how pandoc renders a format, you can create a custom writer using the Lua language. Pandoc has a built-in Lua interpreter, so you needn't install any additional software to do this.

A custom writer is a Lua file that defines functions for rendering each element of a pandoc AST.

For example,

function Para(s)
  return "<paragraph>" .. s .. "</paragraph>"
end

The best way to go about creating a custom writer is to modify the example that comes with pandoc. To get the example, you can do

pandoc --print-default-data-file sample.lua > sample.lua

A custom HTML writer

sample.lua is a full-features HTML writer, with explanatory comments. To use it, just use the path to the custom writer as the writer name:

pandoc -t sample.lua myfile.md

sample.lua defines all the functions needed by any custom writer, so you can design your own custom writer by modifying the functions in sample.lua according to your needs.