Extension: pandoc_title_block
If the file begins with a title block
% title
% author(s) (separated by semicolons)
% date
it will be parsed as bibliographic information, not regular text. (It will be used, for example, in the title of standalone LaTeX or HTML output.) The block may contain just a title, a title and an author, or all three elements. If you want to include an author but no title, or a title and a date but no author, you need a blank line:
%
% Author
% My title
%
% June 15, 2006
The title may occupy multiple lines, but continuation lines must begin with leading space, thus:
% My title
on multiple lines
If a document has multiple authors, the authors may be put on separate lines with leading space, or separated by semicolons, or both. So, all of the following are equivalent:
% Author One
Author Two
% Author One; Author Two
% Author One;
Author Two
The date must fit on one line.
All three metadata fields may contain standard inline formatting (italics, links, footnotes, etc.).
Title blocks will always be parsed, but they will affect the output only when the --standalone (-s) option is chosen. In HTML output, titles will appear twice: once in the document head â€' this is the title that will appear at the top of the window in a browser â€' and once at the beginning of the document body. The title in the document head can have an optional prefix attached (--title-prefix or -T option). The title in the body appears as an H1 element with class “title”, so it can be suppressed or reformatted with CSS. If a title prefix is specified with -T and no title block appears in the document, the title prefix will be used by itself as the HTML title.
The man page writer extracts a title, man page section number, and other header and footer information from the title line. The title is assumed to be the first word on the title line, which may optionally end with a (single-digit) section number in parentheses. (There should be no space between the title and the parentheses.) Anything after this is assumed to be additional footer and header text. A single pipe character (|) should be used to separate the footer text from the header text. Thus,
% PANDOC(1)
will yield a man page with the title PANDOC and section 1.
% PANDOC(1) Pandoc User Manuals
will also have “Pandoc User Manuals” in the footer.
% PANDOC(1) Pandoc User Manuals | Version 4.0
will also have “Version 4.0” in the header.
A YAML metadata block is a valid YAML object, delimited by a line of three hyphens (---) at the top and a line of three hyphens (---) or three dots (...) at the bottom. A YAML metadata block may occur anywhere in the document, but if it is not at the beginning, it must be preceded by a blank line. (Note that, because of the way pandoc concatenates input files when several are provided, you may also keep the metadata in a separate YAML file and pass it to pandoc as an argument, along with your Markdown files:
pandoc chap1.md chap2.md chap3.md metadata.yaml -s -o book.html
Just be sure that the YAML file begins with --- and ends with --- or ....) Alternatively, you can use the --metadata-file option. Using that approach however, you cannot reference content (like footnotes) from the main markdown input document.
Metadata will be taken from the fields of the YAML object and added to any existing document metadata. Metadata can contain lists and objects (nested arbitrarily), but all string scalars will be interpreted as Markdown. Fields with names ending in an underscore will be ignored by pandoc. (They may be given a role by external processors.) Field names must not be interpretable as YAML numbers or boolean values (so, for example, yes, True, and 15 cannot be used as field names).
A document may contain multiple metadata blocks. The metadata fields will be combined through a left-biased union: if two metadata blocks attempt to set the same field, the value from the first block will be taken.
When pandoc is used with -t markdown to create a Markdown document, a YAML metadata block will be produced only if the -s/--standalone option is used. All of the metadata will appear in a single block at the beginning of the document.
Note that YAML escaping rules must be followed. Thus, for example, if a title contains a colon, it must be quoted. The pipe character (|) can be used to begin an indented block that will be interpreted literally, without need for escaping. This form is necessary when the field contains blank lines or block-level formatting:
---
title: 'This is the title: it contains a colon'
author:
- Author One
- Author Two
keywords: [nothing, nothingness]
abstract: |
This is the abstract.
It consists of two paragraphs.
...
Template variables will be set automatically from the metadata. Thus, for example, in writing HTML, the variable abstract will be set to the HTML equivalent of the Markdown in the abstract field:
<p>This is the abstract.</p>
<p>It consists of two paragraphs.</p>
Variables can contain arbitrary YAML structures, but the template must match this structure. The author variable in the default templates expects a simple list or string, but can be changed to support more complicated structures. The following combination, for example, would add an affiliation to the author if one is given:
---
title: The document title
author:
- name: Author One
affiliation: University of Somewhere
- name: Author Two
affiliation: University of Nowhere
...
To use the structured authors in the example above, you would need a custom template:
$for(author)$
$if(author.name)$
$author.name$$if(author.affiliation)$ ($author.affiliation$)$endif$
$else$
$author$
$endif$
$endfor$
Raw content to include in the document’s header may be specified using header-includes; however, it is important to mark up this content as raw code for a particular output format, using the raw_attribute extension), or it will be interpreted as markdown. For example:
header-includes:
- |
```{=latex}
\let\oldsection\section
\renewcommand{\section}[1]{\clearpage\oldsection{#1}}
```
