Page breaks and templates/reference-doc for pandoc

[kakaroto]

I've just started using Manuskript and I like it a lot (other than the frequent crashes unfortunately, slow downs and a couple of issues, but I can live with most of that). The thing that is annoying me the most at the moment though is the compile options because we can only export to HTML with Manuskript itself (which works quite well), but for doc/openoffice/epub, we have to use pandoc and it has trouble with some things, such as text alignment (I've seen their open issue on the subject https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/719 and I've seen the issue reported here as well https://github.com/olivierkes/manuskript/issues/301).

When I use :

# <center> Chapter 1

It works well in Manuskript's HTML export (centered heading), but with pandoc, it will show the # on a line on its own, then followed by the centered text on the next line. If I instead write :

<center> # Chapter 1

Then in Manuskript's HTML export, it will show a centered # Chapter 1 but it will appear correctly in pandoc's HTML export. This difference in behavior between Manuskript and pandoc is very annoying and I wanted to mention it, even though you probably can't do much about it (not without introducing a regression).

The main issue for me is that the exported document by pandoc has a very bad formatting.

• I couldn't figure out a way to ask for a page break between chapters, I tried "\f" instead of "\n" for the transition but it just gets written literally.
• I want to have a cover page, but I didn't find a way to have multiple blank lines (to place the <Book title>\nby <name> in the middle of the page).
• The export allows me to enable/disable writing the folder (chapter) name, but I'd like to have it written as : <Folder name> : <POV> \n <One line Summary>. This made me have a Text element under each chapter just to write the chapter title/subtitle my custom way. Having a 'template for folder->text conversion' would be cool though this isn't particularly critical.
• I want each paragraph to start with an indentation of 0.5, I want the text to be double spaced, I want my " *" scene/pov separator to be centered. I want a specific font, I want to have my "Name / Title / page" in the upper-right corner of every page as a header, etc.. lots of small things like that which would be near impossible to handle correctly without adding tons of customization options.

A solution to my issues are the following :

• Having the "\f" work or a specific entry say "Page break" for Separation (You have "empty line" then "custom", should be easy to add a new entry in that combobox). See lua filters and the pagebreak filter for how to achieve it with pandoc.
• If multiple empty newlines are in a verbatim block, leave them in the output (actually, the verbatim marker "`" appears in the resulting HTML for some reason, both in manuskript html and pandoc's, and the triple apostrophe "```" only works with pandoc and not in manuskript's HTML)
• (optional) Add a customization/template for how to transform a folder into text instead of it just being the title of the folder ($title: $pov \n$summary).
• (optional) Having the ability to set styles would be cool, so that @hmslima (from #301) could use it to set [text]{custom-style="some voice"} but for it to work, the output format needs to be "docx+styles" (see custom styles) so having that by default, or having it as a checkbox for additional pandoc options would be great.
• Add the ability to specify a template for some of the formats, such as docX/latex/opendocument/epub as a pandoc custom option. That should make it so much better to generate a proper document every time and it solved most of my issues.

For the template idea, have a look at this repo with template docs. pandoc has a --template option for those, or a --reference-doc option for docx/pptx/odt. If I place a reference.docx in my data dir (../AppData/Roaming/pandoc), it picks it up automatically and it works (but it's not so obvious for users, and people might want different templates per book). This helped me fix a lot of my issues. I added a transform to replace all the <center> with ###### and I set the reference template to set the heading 6 style to be centered, which works great for my * * * scene breakers, and I could set my styles for each heading and body text, etc..!

I think it would be great if we could generate manuscripts with manuskript which follows the standard manuscript format. With the reference.docx/reference.odt file, and a few regexp tricks, I can now achieve that. All I'd need after an export is to add the header which shows page numbers and do a page break on each chapter (note: the <center> # issue and the triple apostrophe not being recognized for verbatim are remaining which makes manuskript's HTML export break as I tailor the markdown for pandoc).

[kakaroto]

Good news, I've managed to fix pretty much everything with workarounds: the reference.docx trick held the answer to everything.

• I've set the folder transitions to be \n###### \n\n and I edited the style for Heading 6 in the reference doc and enabled the "Insert page break before" option in Word. Now I get the page breaks where I want them.
• I also added a few transformations to swap # <center> into <center>\n# that I enable if I export to HTML or disable otherwise.
• I'm now using ### with heading 3 style for centered text which I automatically change the html tag to using transformations as well, and I enable it if I export to docx.
• I added another transformation to change > into #### and > > into ##### and set my Heading 4 and Heading 5 styles to different fonts, alignements, etc.. to reproduce the "different voice" effect I wanted (I use it for epigraphs actually and for some right aligned quotes I wanted to have).
• I'm using the triple apostrophe "``" for verbatim to add empty lines (between chapter subtitle and first paragraph for example), and that's still broken in Manuskript's HTML renderer, but it works fine with pandoc, so with my other transformations to fix the# ` issue, I will use Pandoc exporter only from now on.

Overall, I have everything I need right now, though it took a lot of workarounds. I would still suggest adding the feature for the page break separator in the combobox, and the option to specify the reference document or template, as well as the option for docx to enable the custom styles (will be easier to set a custom style in the reference doc and specify it by name rather than having to rely on unused headings) as it can help others. If not, at least this issue has information on how the behavior can be achieved with pandoc for others to refer to in the future.

EDIT: I added the docx+styles support, but it turns out it wasn't needed because the styles extension is enabled by default. I've used that to create new styles and not re-use headings for my needs, this way the resulting docx doesn't have bookmarks everywhere a text is centered or styled differently.

[Biep]

Especially the lack of options (or documentation for options) for separators is annoying. I can see that "\n" produces a newline. What other codes are there? I'd really love to have page breaks. Also, "I want more granularity". For the top two levels of folders I want page breaks, whereas for deeper levels a newline is just fine. Thank you for working on this program!