Re: metadata changes merged

[John MacFarlane <fiddlosopher-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

+++ BP Jonsson [Jun 26 13 18:32 ]:
> 2013-06-26 18:15, John MacFarlane skrev:
> >The implemented system is a bit different than what I described before
> >(and not yet documented at all).  Markdown files can have a YAML
> >metadata block, but it must come at the very beginning of the file.
> >(Previously I'd considered allowing metadata anywhere in the file,
> >but I'm not sold on that -- external tools really wouldn't find metadata
> >that is not at the beginning of the file useful, because you'd have
> >to parse markdown to discover which sections were metadata.  I'm still
> >considering this issue.)
> 
> I suppose you can still have the metadata in a separate file as
> long as pandoc sees that file first?
> 
>     pandoc --template foo metadata.yaml bar.mkd -o bar.pdf

Yes.

> What about concatenating several source files which all have
> YAML blocks at the beginning. Will pandoc ignore them, filter
> them out or what?

Currently pandoc would try to parse the YAML blocks inside
the file as text.

> >One nice thing about this new system is that you can, for example,
> >have a letter.latex template with fields like $to$, $salutation$,
> >$closing$.  Then a letter can begin with:
> 
> What about relative precedence of variables defined on the
> command line and in-file?

Currently pandoc does a "merge."  So, if you have an "author"
defined in metadata, and you specify an additional "author"
variable on the command line, pandoc will behave as if you
had given a list of two authors.

I'm really not sure what the optimal behavior is here.