The custom style mechanism of the docx writer is great and makes my life as author much easier. A further improvement could be the following. What do you think?

So far, when converting to and from docx, a fixed set of styles is used by both the reader and writer. So we have styles “Body Text”, “Heading 1”, “Caption”, “Figure”, and so on. These correspond (of course) to the Markdown elements. This works great with using Pandoc’s standard reference.docx. But most publishers provide templates with their their own styles and their own names for them. Example: Pearson uses CHAP_TTL for chapter titles and CHAP_BM for body text.

My idea is to make the styles (in fact style names) configurable. So we could have a config file that defines the mapping. Something like:

Body Text = CHAP_BM

First Paragraph = HEADFIRST

Heading 1 = CHAP_TTL

Heading 2 = H1

Footnote Text = FN

…

This mapping file could then be used by both the reader and writer for convenient conversion.

Would that make sense to you?

Best,

Henning