Thank you for explaining about the --filter option. I had somehow managed to not see that despite repeatedly scanning through the documentation.
On Sunday, 1 February 2015, John MacFarlane <
jgm-TVLZxgkOlNX2fBVCVOL8/A@public.gmane.org> wrote:
I think for your purposes (if you don't need blockquotes for another
purpose, which sounds like the case), you could just write a filter that
converts blockquotes to HTML center elements.
You can write the filter in Haskell or in python, perl, or a number of
other languages with pandoc filter libraries.
In Haskell it would look something like
``` haskell
#!/usr/bin/env runhaskell
import Text.Pandoc.JSON
main = toJSONFilter bqToCenter
where bqToCenter (Just (Format "html")) (BlockQuote bs) =
RawBlock (Format "html") "<center>" :
bs ++ [RawBlock (Format "html") "</center>"
bqToCenter x = [x]
```
(untested). See the pandocfilters library in PyPI for many examples
using the python library, if that's what you prefer.
To invoke your filter (assuming it's executable and called bqToCenter.hs):
pandoc --filter ./bqToCenter.hs etc.
+++ Gordon Steemson [Feb 01 15 00:14 ]:
Well, it still seems straightforward enough. These days Unicode is
available. If someone wants a literal arrow in those positions they can use
a dash other than an ASCII hyphen-minus, or use an angle bracket other than
an ASCII less-than / greater-than, or just break down and use a Unicode
arrow character directly (several exist to choose from).
I agree with you that centred or right alignment are presentational things
(unless you’re trying to write Arabic or Hebrew, in which case left
alignment is), but I strongly believe that being able to centre something
on the page is nevertheless important to conveying meaning in certain
narrow use cases, in the same way as a hard line break is within a postal
address. I am attempting to use Pandoc to publish my mediocre attempts at
fiction to various online repositories, and in examining the results of my
past (pre-Pandoc) efforts, I have come to the conclusion that there is a
marked difference in effect when some important bit of information is
placed in the middle of the page, versus as just an unusually short
paragraph clustered at the left edge with all the others.
I approve in principle of your proposed solution (“just use a ‹div› element
and style it with CSS”); unfortunately, several of the submission formats I
am forced to conform to are extremely crippled, and do not support either
of those features of HTML. Rephrasing them as some other feature is far
from simple from within the Lua custom writer.
Short of outputting to a native Haskell representation file, piping that to
a filter program, and piping that result back through a second invocation
of Pandoc, is there any way of invoking a transformational filter on the
native AST as it is being processed? I keep seeing various language
bindings (Perl, Python, PHP, etc.) that appear to be for doing just that,
but I can’t find any mention of how you actually invoke a filter written to
use one of them when you start the Pandoc tool.
On Saturday, 31 January 2015 22:45:48 UTC-8, John MacFarlane wrote:
+++ Gordon Steemson [Jan 31 15 18:25 ]:
>1) If someone, just to be difficult, needs to have literal ASCII arrows
at
>the start and/or end of their actual output text block, can it be
>accommodated in a simple way by backslash-escaping? At what stage does
that
>get stripped out — before the custom writer functions get called or
after?
Before. The escaping is resolved in the parser.
2) What would be involved in modifying the Pandoc markdown parser to
>recognize the obvious extension to this syntax, demonstrated below?
Well, it would be quite involved. We'd need to modify the Pandoc
document model to add these alignment containers (though I suppose
we could use Div elements with special classes), then modify the
Markdown parser and all the writers.
Centering has come up before on this list (you can search for earlier
discussions). My general feeling is that pandoc should focus on
structural elements of documents, and things like centering and
right-aligning are too presentational.
Note you can always put things in divs with classes, and format them
with CSS in HTML or with a simple filter in other formats.
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