Config file for markdown output options?

[jgm]

See #1786, #1826, #2698, #2567, and existing --atx-headers, --reference-location, --reference-links options.

Perhaps there could be an option to specify a YAML or JSON file that says how to render various markdown constructions.

[mb21]

probably related? #4627

[jgm]

@mb21 I think that's a separate issue. (Well, if we just included new command-line options for every possible markdown-output preference, then #4627 would include this issue. But I was looking for a way to avoid this proliferation of options.)

[mb21]

Ah, so this would be in addition to command-line options like --atx-headers and in addition to markdown writer extensions?

My thinking with bringing up #4627 was more that if we would read out pandoc options from the YAML metadata, the --metadata-file option could also be used to read a config file. But yes, we would still have to add new commandline-options or writer extensions, and it would require us to untangle the YAML parsing from the markdown parsing...

[mb21]

But yes, I can start to see your thinking. The trouble with writer extensions is that they are just booleans. And if you want to configure a pretty printer (which is what we're getting into the direction of here), you would want to specify many more things, like the order of preference of the various table formats, or also just set something like list-indent=2.

But it still feels weird that then you could configure the markdown writer with a config file, but still couldn't configure all the other command-line-options with a config file, without using an external tool like panrunner...