Many apologies as I'm sure this is all obvious once one knows, but I'm a bit stuck. I've got some Pandoc Markdown files which I'm trying to convert to PDF using Pandoc. They include various non-ascii characters, all in unicode. If I run:
/usr/local/bin/pandoc -f markdown+pipe_tables+grid_tables+yaml_metadata_block --filter pandoc-citeproc --filter pandoc-csv2table -s -o formatted/Draft3.pdf text/metadata.yaml text/1-Introduction.md
I get the following:
! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char ṣ (U+1E63)
(inputenc) not set up for use with LaTeX.
See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
Type H <return> for immediate help.
...
l.125 Vandenhoeck \& Ruprecht, 1990), 39--62.}
Try running pandoc with --latex-engine=xelatex.
pandoc: Error producing PDF
So the next step was to switch to xelatex based on the helpful suggestion from pandoc. As long as I don't try to use any babel or polyglossia environments, or biblatex, this works fine. But as I want to use both, I'm a bit stuck. First thing is that it looks like the default template tries to use babel rather than polyglossia if xetex is the engine. Is there a reason for this? (I want to use the biblatex-sbl style for my bibliography, and they recommend polyglossia.)
I want to use English (UK) as my main language, with Hebrew and Syriac as other languages (I've also got some ancient Greek, but the main font I've chosen works fine and the output looks good for that without using a separate language environment).
As a starting point, what language options do I set in my YAML metadata to enable those other two language environments, and how do I specify the fonts for them?
Here's my YAML metadata file so far:
---
author: Lyndon Drake
documentclass: memoir
toc: true
papersize: a4
fontsize: 12pt
top-level-division: chapter
number-sections: true
mainfont: Skolar PE Light
mainfontoptions: Numbers=OldStyle
bibliography: /Users/lyndon/Documents/Media/Bibliography/0lib.bib
csl: /Users/lyndon/Documents/Media/Bibliography/society-of-biblical-literature-fullnote-bibliography.csl
notes-after-punctuation: true
---
Many thanks in advance for any help on this,
Lyndon