package pandoc-inspect

The OCaml pandoc library

This library is meant to help creating filters for pandoc which is tool to convert between textual formats, notably markdown and LaTeX. It is vaguely inspired of the corresponding Haskell library.

Documentation

The documentation for the library is available online.

Building filters

Basically, a pandoc filter will

1. read JSON data from the standard input with Yojson.Basic.from_channel,

2. convert it to the library's standard representation with Pandoc.of_json,

3. transform it using the Pandoc.map function which recursively maps functions on various elements,

4. convert the result to JSON with Pandoc.of_json,

5. print the result on the standard output using Yojson.Basic.to_string.

Once you have build your filter (say, myfilter) you can use it to transform pandoc documents while they are being processed by using the --filter commandline argument. For instance:

pandoc --filter=myfilter file.md -o file.pdf

Examples

Some examples are provided in the examples directory for you convenience (or because I needed those).

• pandoc-abbreviations: adds non-breakable spaces after abbreviations (listed in abbreviations file). Pandoc already does this natively, but it does not play well with other plugins.

• pandoc-crossref: handles cross-references in LaTeX. It replaces references of the form #chap:bla and #sec:bli to \cref{chap:bla} and \cref{sec:bli} respectively.

• pandoc-include: includes other documents. It replaces

  !include "file"
  

  by the contents of the file file, it replaces

  ```{.ocaml include="test.ml" from=2 to=5}
  ```
  

  by the contents of the file test.ml between lines 2 and 5, it replaces

  ```{.ocaml include="test.ml" from=2 to=-1}
  ```
  

  by the content from line 2 to last but one line, it replaces

  ```{.ocaml include="test.ml" from="BEGIN" to="TO"}
  ```
  

  by the content between lines containing "BEGIN" and "END", excluded. Useful for including small code snippets delimited by comments such as (* BEGIN *) and (* END *).

• pandoc-inspect: acts as the identity plugin, but prints the JSON output given by pandoc on the standard error. Useful for debugging and adding missing features to the library.

• pandoc-pdf2png: changes the extension of images from .pdf to .png. Useful if you want to compile both to pdf and html.

• pandoc-replace: replaces words by others. Useful for fixing capitalization for instance.

Bugs and features requests

The code is simple and stable enough for me but some features are missing. Feel free to fill bug reports or submit pull requests.