New to the group, and only (so far!) the most casual of pandoc users. I'm having some trouble getting pandoc to do things that the xelatex command can do. I'm looking for someone (or someones) that can help get me to a solution **and** explain what pandoc is doing behind the scenes so I can debug these sort of problems in the future.
In short -- I have an tex document with some hebrew characters. If I use the xelatex command directly to convert this document, the hebrew characters are rendered correctly in the PDF
However, if I attempt to do the conversion with pandoc using the xelatex engine
$ pandoc --latex-engine=xelatex simple.tex -o from-pandoc.pdf
pandoc will render the PDF **without** the hebrew characters. There's just blank white space where the hebrew should be.
So, first question if anyone knows: How do I make pandoc render the hebrew into a PDF?
If there's no clear path to that answer, how to do I debug the pandoc/xelatex interaction in order to understand why pandoc's use of the engine produces different results, and how I might be able to change that invocation. Regarding this -- my understanding of pandoc is very limited, so baby words/steps that let me become less of a baby are appreciated :)
Also, I have some specific examples posted over on the tex StackExchange with hebrew examples
Finally -- my ultimate goal here is to convert HTML documents with hebrew into PDFs. As that also doesn't work, I'm focused on understanding the [tex] to [pdf] conversion. If there's some extra wrinkle involved with [html] to [pdf] ( which I presume -- (correctly?) -- involves xelatex in the middle) feel free to chime in there as well.