Custom styles for ODT (and maybe LaTeX and RST) writers

[matthijskooijman]

Currently, you can customize formatting by providing some customized styles in a reference odt/docx file to pandoc. These styles are copied into the generated document and applied to selected elements in the document.

However, this only supports a limited, hard-coded list of styles. E.g. the 'Heading 1' style is applied to level-1 headings, the 'Text body' style to regular paragraphs, the 'Bullet Symbols' style to bullets. On top of this, I'd like to be able to specify other styles to use, on a block-by-block basis.

My usecase is that I'm writing a book, and my publisher requires the text to be delivered in docx or odt format, using a set of custom styles with non-standard style names. I have two challenges:

1. Regular styles have different names, so I need to use e.g. "Publisher Heading 1" for first-level headings.
2. Some parts of my document must use completely different styles, which have no equivalent in the pandoc AST (e.g. notes for the layouter must use the "Layout Notes" style).

If I have some way to specify custom style names in the AST, I can use a pandoc filter to introduce the proper style names in the AST and have the writers use the right styles. Ideally, I'd be able to specify the style names for challenge 2 above directly in my markdown source.

Attributes seem like a good fit for this, so that would work out to something like this in markdown:

# My Header {style="Fancy Header 1"}

Note that this is already supported by the current markdown parser, and results in this JSON:

[{"unMeta":{}},
 [{"t":"Header","c":[1,["my-header",[],[["style","Fancy Header 1"]]],
 [{"t":"Str","c":"My"},{"t":"Space","c":[]},{"t":"Str","c":"Header"}]]}]
]

However, converting this to ODT or DOCX drops the attributes completely.

I'm aware that not all elements currently allow specifying styles, but that's another discussion. What I'd like to see is that, for all elements that currently support attributes, the "style" attribute be interpreted as a style name in the ODT and DOCX writes.

ODT and DOCX have a distinction between paragraph and character styles, but it seems that using the paragraph styles for block elements and character styles for inline elements is sufficient?

Does this sound reasonable? Is the "style" attribute the right fit here? For the HTML writer, the style attribute should contain a bit of raw CSS. I don't think we can have a single syntax that works for both HTML and ODT/DOCX, though perhaps we can have something that allows specifying two distinct attributes to allow working with both? At first glance, the class is more appropriate than an attribute, since a class is also a name that indirectly specifies formatting to be used. However, a class can be specified multiple times, which I don't think is applicable to DOCX / ODT styles? Or perhaps just use the first / last class name specified?

I'll likely spend a bit of time implementing this for my own needs, but I'd rather know up-front if this has any chance of being merged.

@mpickering, It seems that such a style= attribute could perhaps also be used by an asciidoc reader to fix #1234 / #1235.

[gbjbaanb]

It is possible to alter the styles in the docx after the generation is complete. For example, here I set the style for all tables to BlueTableStyle (which is a style in the template dotx I use to generate docx from pandoc). The styles are contained in the document.xml file inside the docx archive.

Obviously this is not an ideal solution and being able for pandoc to spit out the desired style name given the right directives would be great, similar to how you can specify them for HTML. I don't see why they would need different input syntax, the use-case for generating different styles based on output type is a can of worms best left closed.

7z x -y %~1.docx word\document.xml 
sed "s/<w:tblStyle w:val=\"TableNormal\"/<w:tblStyle w:val=\"BlueTableStyle\"/g" word\document.xml > word\document2.xml
copy word\document2.xml word\document.xml /y
7z u -y %~1.docx word\document.xml

[krtek4]

I am in the exact same situation : writing a book and the publisher insists on docx file format using their custom styles.

Is there any chance this could get implemented ?

The workaround proposed works really great when you want to style all given elements the same way, or rename a given style to some other one. But when just some elements needs to use a specific style I don't see how it can be made to work.

Thanks !

[matthijskooijman]

@krtek4, I ended up using docutils's rst2odt tool with the --odf-config-file and --stylesheet options to customize the output styles, which ended up suiting by needs just enough (with a few minor customizations to better handle images, code, etc.). I haven't found time to clean up my build process well enough to publish it, but if you're interested I can do a quick sweep, tar it up and send it to you. If so, drop me an email to not further pollute this issue.

[josdirksen]

I'm writing a book for Packt, which also uses a crappy docx template. I'm now using pandoc to convert my markdown file to docx, and afer that use a couple of XSLT steps to convert the styles from pandoc to the styles required by the template from Packt. This seems to work ok for the styles I'm currently using (basic bullets, lists, images etc.)

I haven't needed tables yet, but that should also be doable I guess. If you're interested let me know.

[krtek4]

Hi @josdirksen,

Finally I am use rst2odt like @matthijskooijman suggested. The tool allows for custom mapping from node types to ODT styles. For now I am able to manage with that quite well.

Hadn't thought of XSLT at the time, but that is also definitively a great idea :) Good continuation with your book.

[mb21]

Is this request fulfilled with http://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#custom-styles-in-docx-output ? (at least for docx)

[krtek4]

As far as I can tell, this is exactly what is needed for docx. It is really similar to the feature I am using in rst2odt

[mb21]

Since this feature was implemented in docx, we might think about doing the same for ODT, ICML and maybe LaTeX and RST writers...

[matthijskooijman]

From a quick glance at the docs, I think what I requested in this issue would be made possible with that new feature. However, I've long since finished writing my book, so I have no specific interest in this feature anymore, so feel free to close this issue (or leave it open if someone else wants to do actual testing of the feature and report back).

[simongareste]

@mb21: I am very much interested in this for odt, and available to test.

[mb21]

@simongareste Personally, I'm not too familiar with the ODT format... feel free to take a look at the writer generating the OpenDocument format and the one packaging it into a .odt zip, pull requests welcome!

[marcban]

Unfortunately I'm not a Haskell developer, but here are some specs to help a little:

• source md file : this is a <span custom-style="mystyle">custom style span</span>
• in content.xml part of .odt file, this should generate:

<text:p text:style-name="Text_20_body">
  this is a <text:span text:style-name="mystyle">custom style span</text:span>
</text:p>`

• in styles.xml part, this should add a style (if not present) under <office:styles> tag, with value:

<style:style style:name="mystyle" style:family="text">
	<style:text-properties fo:font-weight="bold"/>
</style:style>

I propose that the custom style is bold by default, so that it will be visible in the output. Of course, by using a custom template, the user can define his own style.