Variables not used correctly in restructuredtext files

[stooj]

Including a yaml file with an rst file does not work correctly

To reproduce -

test.rst

This is the story of our first teacher

variables.yaml

---
title: A title

---

Command:

pandoc -s -o test.pdf test.rst variables.yaml

Output:

For reference, if I parse the input with markdown, it works

Command:

pandoc -s -o test2.pdf -f markdown test.rst variables.yaml

Output:

Pandoc version:

pandoc 1.15.2
Compiled with texmath 0.8.4, highlighting-kate 0.6.
Syntax highlighting is supported for the following languages:
    abc, actionscript, ada, agda, apache, asn1, asp, awk, bash, bibtex, boo, c,
    changelog, clojure, cmake, coffee, coldfusion, commonlisp, cpp, cs, css,
    curry, d, diff, djangotemplate, dockerfile, dot, doxygen, doxygenlua, dtd,
    eiffel, email, erlang, fasm, fortran, fsharp, gcc, glsl, gnuassembler, go,
    haskell, haxe, html, idris, ini, isocpp, java, javadoc, javascript, json,
    jsp, julia, kotlin, latex, lex, lilypond, literatecurry, literatehaskell,
    lua, m4, makefile, mandoc, markdown, mathematica, matlab, maxima, mediawiki,
    metafont, mips, modelines, modula2, modula3, monobasic, nasm, noweb,
    objectivec, objectivecpp, ocaml, octave, opencl, pascal, perl, php, pike,
    postscript, prolog, pure, python, r, relaxng, relaxngcompact, rest, rhtml,
    roff, ruby, rust, scala, scheme, sci, sed, sgml, sql, sqlmysql,
    sqlpostgresql, tcl, tcsh, texinfo, verilog, vhdl, xml, xorg, xslt, xul,
    yacc, yaml, zsh
Default user data directory: /home/stooj/.pandoc
Copyright (C) 2006-2015 John MacFarlane
Web:  http://pandoc.org
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is no warranty, not even for merchantability or fitness
for a particular purpose.

[mb21]

pandoc test.rst variables.yaml simply concatenates the two files. But in RST, the metadata fields don't follow the YAML format (as opposed to markdown) and are called bibliographic fields. For example:

================================
 reStructuredText Test Document
================================

:Author: David Goodger

document text...

Alternatively, you could just supply pandoc with the variables directly: pandoc -V title="my title" -s -f rst test.rst

[jgm]

This is right. YAML metadata is a feature of pandoc's extended Markdown dialect; it doesn't work with RST (though you can use RST methods to specify these things in RST).

[ZelphirKaltstahl]

@mb21 However, the bibliographic fields listed on that page do not cover all the things one can write in the YAML metadata in Pandoc Markdown – That's a problem and needs to be circumvented in other ways. I don't see a way to specify keywords for example, which is very important for PDFs.