Re: proposal for new metadata

[Tillmann Rendel <rendel-jNDFPZUTrfTbB13WlS47k8u21/r88PR+s0AfqQuZ5sE@public.gmane.org>]

Hi,

John MacFarlane wrote:
> See https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/851
> Comments welcome, there or here.

Looks very good. Couple of questions/comments/ideas:

(1) Can we use metadata to set arbitrary pandoc settings that are 
currently set as command-line parameters. For example, can we activate 
"--smart" with metadata?

(2) Will there be support for global metadata defaults, maybe in a 
configuration file? Then we could have the following overriding chain: 
command-line data overrides in-file data, and in-file data overrides 
global data.

(3) How are fields with string-content parsed, as Block or [Block] or 
[Inline]? What happens if meta-data contains references to footnotes in 
the main document? (That actually makes sense for author lists of 
academic papers). What happens if meta-data contains bibliographic 
references, numbered examples etc?

(4) How will the need for Yaml escaping interact with parsing string 
fields as markdown? For example, will it be convenient to put the whole 
abstract of a paper in the metadata block? That could be a couple of 
paragraphs, maybe with a bulleted list and some references.

(5) Can metadata also be stored in a file different from the content, 
and then referenced by filename at the command line?

(6) Can we use metadata to pull in more metadata from an external file, 
in order to share settings between similar documents.

(7) Did you consider using the existing definition list syntax for the 
key-value-lists you need for metadata, instead of YAML?

(8) Will the pandoc executable offer some way to extract the meta-data 
block from a file, so that third-party tools don't have to look for it 
themselves? For shell scripts, it would even be nice to extract the 
value of single meta-data field, something like `pandoc --get author 
file.md`.

   Tillmann