pandoc-js-elements is a pandoc Lua filter which enables the execution of JavaScript code blocks as well as the insertion of elements created with JS into the document. This permits inclusion of dynamically generated content such as interactive and responsive figures or dynamic textual elements in HTML output.
pandoc input.md -o output.html -L js-elements.luaTo execute JavaScript code blocks, the frontmatter key js-elements needs to be set
to true:
---
author: R. N. West
title: Dynamic Documents with JavaScript!
js-elements: true
---
Document content...Code blocks with class js will then be executed instead of being included in the document:
```js
console.log('The date and time is ' + new Date());
```To prevent execution of a JavaScript code block, set the exec attribute to false:
```{.js exec=false}
// This code is not executed!
console.log('The date and time is ' + new Date());
```The code block is then included in the document as it would normally be. To prevent execution and exclude the code block from the document, set the include attribute to false:
```{.js exec=false include=false}
// This code is neither executed nor included in the document.
console.log('The date and time is ' + new Date());
```To execute a code block and include it in the document, set the include attribute to true:
```{.js include=true}
// This code is executed and included in the document.
console.log('The date and time is ' + new Date());
```pandoc-js-elements places all executable code blocks in a single JavaScript module, which is written to the path js/elements.js and added to the header-includes template variable (alternatively, this file location is also available under the document metadata variable js-elements-path). Therefore, import statements may be used:
```js
import * as d3 from "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/d3@7/+esm";
```Elements that were previously created with JS can be included in the document by referencing them in an inline JS code element:
```js
const span = document.createElement('span');
span.textContent = 'I am a `<span>`.'
```
This is a span: `span`{.js}which results in the following HTML fragment:
<p>This is a span: <span>I am a <span>.</span></p>
The expression in the inline code element needs to either be an object with Element in its prototype chain or a string, number, or function (or a Promise which resolves to any of these). Here is an example of a number:
The number Pi is `Math.PI`{.js}.which results in the following HTML fragment:
<p>The number Pi is 3.141592653589793.</p>
If the provided expression is a function, a placeholder element will be created in place of the inline code element (with the specified Id, classes, and attributes), and the function will be executed once after the document has loaded with the placeholder element passed as the only argument. This is useful for creating responsive elements (e.g. elements that automatically change size when the page width changes). Some useful functions for creating responsive elements are included in js-utils/responsive-elts.js. The function responsiveElt transforms a given element update function into one which executes every time the element changes size.
Note that a placeholder element will be created even when the provided expression isn't a function. Where the creation of an element doesn't happen instantly (e.g. because a library needs to be loaded, or data processed before a graph can be drawn), it is desirable to avoid layout shift. To this end, it is helpful to have an element placeholder of the same element type as its replacement (so that the same CSS rules apply) and to be able to specify HTML attributes such as width or height on the element. Both of these actions are supported. To specify the element type, one may set a tag attribute on the inline code element. If no tag is specified, a <span> is used by default. All other attributes and all classes other than js are passed through to the placeholder element. For example, to create an image placeholder element with the class fullwidth and a style attribute:
Here is an image: `replacement_image_handle`{tag="img" .fullwidth style="aspect-ratio: 16/9"}To avoid creating invalid HTML, only HTML tags belonging to phrasing content are permitted.
Where an inline code element of the js class is the only element in a paragraph, it is interpreted as block content instead, allowing all tags belonging to flow content to be used:
Previous paragraph.
`replacement_figure_handle`{tag="figure"}
Subsequent paragraph.In this case, the placeholder element defaults to <div>.
Because creating images or SVGs using JavaScript is very common, the Markdown image syntax is used to provide a simpler method for creating an <img> placeholder:
{.fullwidth style="aspect-ratio: 16/9"}If an image element has a src field which begins and ends with backticks (`), it is interpreted as a JavaScript image element, and a corresponding placeholder is created.
Sometimes it can be helpful to have access to markdown snippets from within JavaScript, e.g. to include markdown-based axes labels in a graph. Since in the browser we do not have access to pandoc anymore, these labels need to be precompiled to HTML. pandoc-js-elements offers a convenient mechanism for this. Attributes of executable code blocks which start with md. are automatically compiled to HTML using pandoc and are available from within JavaScript under the same name (the object md):
```{.js md.xlabel='$x$' md.ylabel='$\\dfrac{dx}{dy}$'}
console.log(md.xlabel.outerHTML);
console.log(md.ylabel.outerHTML);
```which prints the following output to the devtools console (depending on which
html-math-method
was selected - katex in this case):
<span><span class="math inline">x</span></span><span><span class="math inline">\dfrac{dx}{dy}</span></span>
(Note the requirement to escape backslashes in code block attributes.)
Currently, HTML is the only supported output format. In the future, other formats such as LaTeX could be supported as well (e.g. to allow the publication of an interactive HTML document as a non-interactive academic paper in a journal), though dynamic features would obviously only work in HTML.
© 2025 R. N. West. Released under the GPL version 2 or greater. This software carries no warranty of any kind.