Pandoc Processor

Purpose

Converts documents between formats using pandoc.

How It Works

Discovers .md files in the project (default pandoc/ subdirectory) and runs pandoc on each one, producing one output per format listed in formats.

Source Files

Input: pandoc/**/*.md (configurable via src_dirs / src_extensions)
Output: out/processor.generator.pandoc/{relative_path}.{format} for each format

Configuration

[processor.generator.pandoc]
command = "pandoc"             # Path to the pandoc executable
formats = ["pdf", "html", "docx"]
args = []                      # Extra arguments passed to pandoc
output_dir = "out/processor.generator.pandoc"
dep_inputs = []                # Additional files that trigger rebuilds when changed
pdf_engine = ""                # PDF engine; empty = pandoc default (pdflatex)

Key	Type	Default	Description
`command`	string	`"pandoc"`	Path to the pandoc executable
`formats`	string[]	`["pdf", "html", "docx"]`	Output formats to generate
`args`	string[]	`[]`	Extra arguments passed to pandoc
`output_dir`	string	`"out/processor.generator.pandoc"`	Base output directory
`dep_inputs`	string[]	`[]`	Extra files whose changes trigger rebuilds
`pdf_engine`	string	`""`	Forwarded to `--pdf-engine=` when generating PDFs. See below.

Pandoc’s default engine for PDF output is pdflatex, which only handles 8-bit-encoded text. Source files containing characters outside latin-1 (Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic, CJK, accented Unicode like λ, ש, Ω, é) will fail to compile under pdflatex without manual \usepackage{...} setup.

Set pdf_engine to use a Unicode-aware engine instead:

[processor.generator.pandoc]
formats = ["pdf"]
pdf_engine = "xelatex"   # or "lualatex"

Recognized values:

Value	When to use
`""` (default)	Pandoc’s default (pdflatex). ASCII / latin-1 only.
`pdflatex`	Same as default; explicit form.
`xelatex`	Unicode-aware. Best general-purpose choice for non-ASCII text.
`lualatex`	Unicode-aware, embeds a Lua interpreter for advanced typesetting.
`tectonic`	Self-contained engine that downloads packages on demand.
`wkhtmltopdf`, `weasyprint`, `prince`	HTML-based PDF rendering pipelines.
`context`	ConTeXt-based typesetting.

Notes:

pdf_engine only affects products whose output format is pdf. For other formats (html, docx, etc.) the field is silently ignored.
The configured engine is added to the processor’s required-tools list, so rsconstruct doctor and rsconstruct tool list-configured will flag it as missing if it isn’t installed.
Changing pdf_engine invalidates the cache for affected products (it is part of the config-change checksum), so a rebuild is triggered automatically.
An unknown value is rejected at config-load time with a clear error; the build never starts.
The pdflatex-specific \pdftrailerid{} reproducibility hint is only injected when the engine is pdflatex (or the empty default). Other engines would error on it.

Batch support

Each input file is processed individually, producing its own output file.

Clean behavior

Pandoc is a Generator — see Clean behavior and rsconstruct clean.

RSConstruct - Rust Build Tool