markdown+bracketed_spans custom-style shorthand

[STrRedWolf]

An idea I'm tossing out here. The context here is that I'm writing stories in Markdown but there are frequent uses of different styles in the resulting Word DOCX file. I'm using a reference doc to define those styles, but having to keep writing custom-style="Foo" in my text is rather tedious.

So, I propose a shorthand, so that:

[This text would translate into something awesome]{.Bar}

would be taken as:

[This text would translate into something awesome]{custom-style="Bar"}

I've worked around this with the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use File::Basename;

if(scalar @ARGV < 1 || @ARGV > 2) {
	print STDERR "Argument count mismatch\n";
	exit 1;
}

my $in=$ARGV[0];
my $orig=basename($in);
my $base=basename($in,".md");

my $cr="custom-ref.docx";
$cr=$ARGV[1] if(@ARGV == 2);

open(IN,"<",$in) || die "Can't open $in: $!";
open(OUT,"|-","pandoc","-s","--reference-doc=$cr",
	"-f","markdown+bracketed_spans+backtick_code_blocks+fenced_code_attributes+fenced_divs",
	"--wrap=preserve","-t","docx","-o","$base.docx") || die "Can't output to pandoc: $!";

while(<IN>) {
	chomp;
	my $l=$_;
	$l=~s/\]{\.(\S+?)}/\]{custom-style="$1"}/g;
	print OUT "$l   \n";
}
close(IN);
close(OUT);

[jgm]

A cleaner workaround is to use a Lua filter that finds Span elements with class "Bar" and adds the "custom-style" attribute. This would be 4 lines or so of Lua and would run very efficiently as part of a pandoc conversion.

[STrRedWolf]

So something like:

function Span(elem)
   if #elem.classes > 0 then
      elem.attributes["custom-style"]=elem.classes[1]
   end
   return elem
end