Re: simple dictionary with pandoc

[Albert Krewinkel <albert+pandoc-9EawChwDxG8hFhg+JK9F0w@public.gmane.org>]

Hi Tamás,

Tamás Ferenci writes:

> I was thinking of implementing a very-very simple dictionary with pandoc.
> The idea is the following: I store the necessary information in a
> YAML-file, such as this:
>
> ---
> dictionary:
> - hungarian: asztal
>   english: table
>   remark: Can be made of wood.
> - hungarian: szék
>   english: chair
>   remark: We sit on it.
> ...
>
> Then I use a pandoc conversion with a custom template to produce a markdown
> file (arranging them in a table or list), to which I again apply pandoc to
> convert to HTML. Both a Hungarian-English and an English-Hungarian
> dictionary could be produced; a simple script could automate this whole
> process, using the above YAML file as an input and producing the two HTML
> files as outputs.
>
> My first problem is however whether it is possible at all to sort the
> entries (alphabetically) with a template?

No, sorting in templates is not possible. See
https://github.com/jgm/doctemplates for a full list of pandoc templating
engine features.

> If not, are there any good solutions to this problem? Or pandoc is simply
> not suited to solve a task like this...?

You could write a Lua filter which converts the dictionary into a normal
table. This has the advantage that you'd not be limited to a single
output format. Sorting is possible in Lua, but somewhat awkward. See
https://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/manual.html#pdf-table.sort. Unicode and
locale aware sorting is even harder.

A better solution might be to write the dictionary as a CSV file, use
external tools to sort it, then use pandoc's CSV reader to produce a
table.

Cheers,
Albert

--
Albert Krewinkel
GPG: 8eed e3e2 e8c5 6f18 81fe  e836 388d c0b2 1f63 1124

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