3.4 Options affecting specific writers

--self-contained

Deprecated synonym for --embed-resources --standalone.

--embed-resources

Produce a standalone HTML file with no external dependencies, using data: URIs to incorporate the contents of linked scripts, stylesheets, images, and videos. The resulting file should be “self-contained,” in the sense that it needs no external files and no net access to be displayed properly by a browser. This option works only with HTML output formats, including html4, html5, html+lhs, html5+lhs, s5, slidy, slideous, dzslides, and revealjs. Scripts, images, and stylesheets at absolute URLs will be downloaded; those at relative URLs will be sought relative to the working directory (if the first source file is local) or relative to the base URL (if the first source file is remote). Elements with the attribute data-external="1" will be left alone; the documents they link to will not be incorporated in the document. Limitation: resources that are loaded dynamically through JavaScript cannot be incorporated; as a result, fonts may be missing when --mathjax is used, and some advanced features (e.g. zoom or speaker notes) may not work in an offline “self-contained” reveal.js slide show.

--html-q-tags

Use <q> tags for quotes in HTML. (This option only has an effect if the smart extension is enabled for the input format used.)

--ascii

Use only ASCII characters in output. Currently supported for XML and HTML formats (which use entities instead of UTF-8 when this option is selected), CommonMark, gfm, and Markdown (which use entities), roff man and ms (which use hexadecimal escapes), and to a limited degree LaTeX (which uses standard commands for accented characters when possible).

--reference-links

Use reference-style links, rather than inline links, in writing Markdown or reStructuredText. By default inline links are used. The placement of link references is affected by the --reference-location option.

--reference-location=block|section|document

Specify whether footnotes (and references, if reference-links is set) are placed at the end of the current (top-level) block, the current section, or the document. The default is document. Currently this option only affects the markdown, muse, html, epub, slidy, s5, slideous, dzslides, and revealjs writers.

--markdown-headings=setext|atx

Specify whether to use ATX-style (#-prefixed) or Setext-style (underlined) headings for level 1 and 2 headings in Markdown output. (The default is atx.) ATX-style headings are always used for levels 3+. This option also affects Markdown cells in ipynb output.

--list-tables

Render tables as list tables in RST output.

--top-level-division=default|section|chapter|part

Treat top-level headings as the given division type in LaTeX, ConTeXt, DocBook, and TEI output. The hierarchy order is part, chapter, then section; all headings are shifted such that the top-level heading becomes the specified type. The default behavior is to determine the best division type via heuristics: unless other conditions apply, section is chosen. When the documentclass variable is set to report, book, or memoir (unless the article option is specified), chapter is implied as the setting for this option. If beamer is the output format, specifying either chapter or part will cause top-level headings to become \part{..}, while second-level headings remain as their default type.

-N, --number-sections

Number section headings in LaTeX, ConTeXt, HTML, Docx, ms, or EPUB output. By default, sections are not numbered. Sections with class unnumbered will never be numbered, even if --number-sections is specified.

--number-offset=NUMBER[,NUMBER,…]

Offset for section headings in HTML output (ignored in other output formats). The first number is added to the section number for top-level headings, the second for second-level headings, and so on. So, for example, if you want the first top-level heading in your document to be numbered “6”, specify --number-offset=5. If your document starts with a level-2 heading which you want to be numbered “1.5”, specify --number-offset=1,4. Offsets are 0 by default. Implies --number-sections.

--listings

Use the listings package for LaTeX code blocks. The package does not support multi-byte encoding for source code. To handle UTF-8 you would need to use a custom template. This issue is fully documented here: Encoding issue with the listings package.

-i, --incremental

Make list items in slide shows display incrementally (one by one). The default is for lists to be displayed all at once.

--slide-level=NUMBER

Specifies that headings with the specified level create slides (for beamer, s5, slidy, slideous, dzslides). Headings above this level in the hierarchy are used to divide the slide show into sections; headings below this level create subheads within a slide. Valid values are 0-6. If a slide level of 0 is specified, slides will not be split automatically on headings, and horizontal rules must be used to indicate slide boundaries. If a slide level is not specified explicitly, the slide level will be set automatically based on the contents of the document; see Structuring the slide show.

--section-divs

Wrap sections in <section> tags (or <div> tags for html4), and attach identifiers to the enclosing <section> (or <div>) rather than the heading itself. See Heading identifiers, below.

--email-obfuscation=none|javascript|references

Specify a method for obfuscating mailto: links in HTML documents. none leaves mailto: links as they are. javascript obfuscates them using JavaScript. references obfuscates them by printing their letters as decimal or hexadecimal character references. The default is none.

--id-prefix=STRING

Specify a prefix to be added to all identifiers and internal links in HTML and DocBook output, and to footnote numbers in Markdown and Haddock output. This is useful for preventing duplicate identifiers when generating fragments to be included in other pages.

-T STRING, --title-prefix=STRING

Specify STRING as a prefix at the beginning of the title that appears in the HTML header (but not in the title as it appears at the beginning of the HTML body). Implies --standalone.

-c URL, --css=URL

Link to a CSS style sheet. This option can be used repeatedly to include multiple files. They will be included in the order specified. This option only affects HTML (including HTML slide shows) and EPUB output. It should be used together with -s/--standalone, because the link to the stylesheet goes in the document header.

A stylesheet is required for generating EPUB. If none is provided using this option (or the css or stylesheet metadata fields), pandoc will look for a file epub.css in the user data directory (see --data-dir). If it is not found there, sensible defaults will be used.

--reference-doc=FILE

Use the specified file as a style reference in producing a docx or ODT file.

Docx

For best results, the reference docx should be a modified version of a docx file produced using pandoc. The contents of the reference docx are ignored, but its stylesheets and document properties (including margins, page size, header, and footer) are used in the new docx. If no reference docx is specified on the command line, pandoc will look for a file reference.docx in the user data directory (see --data-dir). If this is not found either, sensible defaults will be used.

To produce a custom reference.docx, first get a copy of the default reference.docx: pandoc -o custom-reference.docx --print-default-data-file reference.docx. Then open custom-reference.docx in Word, modify the styles as you wish, and save the file. For best results, do not make changes to this file other than modifying the styles used by pandoc:

Paragraph styles:

  • Normal
  • Body Text
  • First Paragraph
  • Compact
  • Title
  • Subtitle
  • Author
  • Date
  • Abstract
  • Bibliography
  • Heading 1
  • Heading 2
  • Heading 3
  • Heading 4
  • Heading 5
  • Heading 6
  • Heading 7
  • Heading 8
  • Heading 9
  • Block Text
  • Source Code
  • Footnote Text
  • Definition Term
  • Definition
  • Caption
  • Table Caption
  • Image Caption
  • Figure
  • Captioned Figure
  • TOC Heading

Character styles:

  • Default Paragraph Font
  • Body Text Char
  • Verbatim Char
  • Footnote Reference
  • Hyperlink
  • Section Number

Table style:

  • Table
ODT

For best results, the reference ODT should be a modified version of an ODT produced using pandoc. The contents of the reference ODT are ignored, but its stylesheets are used in the new ODT. If no reference ODT is specified on the command line, pandoc will look for a file reference.odt in the user data directory (see --data-dir). If this is not found either, sensible defaults will be used.

To produce a custom reference.odt, first get a copy of the default reference.odt: pandoc -o custom-reference.odt --print-default-data-file reference.odt. Then open custom-reference.odt in LibreOffice, modify the styles as you wish, and save the file.

PowerPoint

Templates included with Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 (either with .pptx or .potx extension) are known to work, as are most templates derived from these.

The specific requirement is that the template should contain layouts with the following names (as seen within PowerPoint):

  • Title Slide
  • Title and Content
  • Section Header
  • Two Content
  • Comparison
  • Content with Caption
  • Blank

For each name, the first layout found with that name will be used. If no layout is found with one of the names, pandoc will output a warning and use the layout with that name from the default reference doc instead. (How these layouts are used is described in PowerPoint layout choice.)

All templates included with a recent version of MS PowerPoint will fit these criteria. (You can click on Layout under the Home menu to check.)

You can also modify the default reference.pptx: first run pandoc -o custom-reference.pptx --print-default-data-file reference.pptx, and then modify custom-reference.pptx in MS PowerPoint (pandoc will use the layouts with the names listed above).

--epub-cover-image=FILE

Use the specified image as the EPUB cover. It is recommended that the image be less than 1000px in width and height. Note that in a Markdown source document you can also specify cover-image in a YAML metadata block (see EPUB Metadata, below).

--epub-title-page=true|false

Determines whether a the title page is included in the EPUB (default is true).

--epub-metadata=FILE

Look in the specified XML file for metadata for the EPUB. The file should contain a series of Dublin Core elements. For example:

 <dc:rights>Creative Commons</dc:rights>
 <dc:language>es-AR</dc:language>

By default, pandoc will include the following metadata elements: <dc:title> (from the document title), <dc:creator> (from the document authors), <dc:date> (from the document date, which should be in ISO 8601 format), <dc:language> (from the lang variable, or, if is not set, the locale), and <dc:identifier id="BookId"> (a randomly generated UUID). Any of these may be overridden by elements in the metadata file.

Note: if the source document is Markdown, a YAML metadata block in the document can be used instead. See below under EPUB Metadata.

--epub-embed-font=FILE

Embed the specified font in the EPUB. This option can be repeated to embed multiple fonts. Wildcards can also be used: for example, DejaVuSans-*.ttf. However, if you use wildcards on the command line, be sure to escape them or put the whole filename in single quotes, to prevent them from being interpreted by the shell. To use the embedded fonts, you will need to add declarations like the following to your CSS (see --css):

@font-face {
   font-family: DejaVuSans;
   font-style: normal;
   font-weight: normal;
   src:url("../fonts/DejaVuSans-Regular.ttf");
}
@font-face {
   font-family: DejaVuSans;
   font-style: normal;
   font-weight: bold;
   src:url("../fonts/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf");
}
@font-face {
   font-family: DejaVuSans;
   font-style: italic;
   font-weight: normal;
   src:url("../fonts/DejaVuSans-Oblique.ttf");
}
@font-face {
   font-family: DejaVuSans;
   font-style: italic;
   font-weight: bold;
   src:url("../fonts/DejaVuSans-BoldOblique.ttf");
}
body { font-family: "DejaVuSans"; }
--epub-chapter-level=NUMBER

Specify the heading level at which to split the EPUB into separate “chapter” files. The default is to split into chapters at level-1 headings. This option only affects the internal composition of the EPUB, not the way chapters and sections are displayed to users. Some readers may be slow if the chapter files are too large, so for large documents with few level-1 headings, one might want to use a chapter level of 2 or 3.

--epub-subdirectory=DIRNAME

Specify the subdirectory in the OCF container that is to hold the EPUB-specific contents. The default is EPUB. To put the EPUB contents in the top level, use an empty string.

--ipynb-output=all|none|best

Determines how ipynb output cells are treated. all means that all of the data formats included in the original are preserved. none means that the contents of data cells are omitted. best causes pandoc to try to pick the richest data block in each output cell that is compatible with the output format. The default is best.

--pdf-engine=PROGRAM

Use the specified engine when producing PDF output. Valid values are pdflatex, lualatex, xelatex, latexmk, tectonic, wkhtmltopdf, weasyprint, pagedjs-cli, prince, context, and pdfroff. If the engine is not in your PATH, the full path of the engine may be specified here. If this option is not specified, pandoc uses the following defaults depending on the output format specified using -t/--to:

--pdf-engine-opt=STRING

Use the given string as a command-line argument to the pdf-engine. For example, to use a persistent directory foo for latexmk’s auxiliary files, use --pdf-engine-opt=-outdir=foo. Note that no check for duplicate options is done.