Customize the Pandoc writer for the ConTeXt output format?

Marcus C. 0
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I'm currently trying to customize the standard writer built into Pandoc to produce output in the ConTeXt format from Markdown input. Unfortunately, the documentation to create a custom writer found at the Pandoc website is not giving me too much information apart from how to write a custom HTML writer. So, I would like to ask for help with some fundamental ideas:

  • What would be the preferrable way to add some (probably) very simple functionality to the ConTeXt writer, e.g.: I would like to rewrite the sequence of characters " - " (in a Markdown document) as another sequence "~-- " (in the resulting ConTeXt document).
  • If I understood correctly, I'm supposed to base my custom writer on the standard (built-in) writers... But where can I find these? There doesn't seem to be anything in /usr/share/pandoc/(I'm working on Linux).
  • The website mentions the "classic style" and the "new style". Apart from one obviously being newer, what style am I supposed to use?

I know that these questions may sound rather simple, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information available beyond the usual basic stuff. Any help would be much appreciated.

writer pandoc
1 Answers

Pandoc has another feature that is similar to custom writers, called "Lua filters". Filters are quite likely a simpler and better choice in this case: They allow to modify the internal document representation. E.g.:

function Inlines (inlines)
  for i=#inlines, 3, -1 do  -- iterate backwards through the list of inlines
    if inlines[i-2].t == 'Space' and inline[i-1] == pandoc.Str '-' and
       inlines[i].t == 'Space' then
      -- Replace elements with raw ConTeXt
      inlines[i-2] = pandoc.RawInline('context', '~--')
      inlines:remove(i)
      inlines:remove(i-1)
    end
  end
  return inlines
end

The above would be used b writing it to a file, and then passing that file to pandoc via --lua-filters FILENAME.lua

The documentation for Lua filters is also less sparse and hopefully more approachable than the docs for custom writers.

tarleb0
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