Bug#888468: pandoc: please support new YAML fields "front/back-notice" for LaTeX and HTML5 output

[Francesco Poli (wintermute)]

Package: pandoc
Version: 1.19.2.4~dfsg-1+b1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch

Hello Debian Haskell Group!
Thanks a lot for maintaining this really nice markup converter in
Debian! The package is very useful and having it in Debian is greatly
appreciated.

While using it, I found that YAML metadata fields are useful for
keeping some metadata about a markdown document in a compact
block between a pair of "---" lines.

So far so good.

But, after reading the documentation, I seem to understand that
(at least for the LaTeX, and hence PDF, output and for the HTML5
output) there is no YAML field suitable for inserting a notice
(with customizable style) at the beginning (between title and TOC)
or at the end of a document.
This notice may possibly be useful to state the copyright and license
terms for the document; it may also be used to state other pieces of
information that should be displayed in a special area at the beginning
or at the end of the document.

Well, I found out that adding support for this feature is really
easy: one just needs to modify the templates used for LaTeX and HTML5
outputs.

I prepared a patch for these two templates, supporting two new
YAML fields named "front-notice" and "back-notice".

Since I think this feature may be useful for other users, I would
like to see my patch applied to the official default templates.

The patch is attached to this bug report: as you can see, it's almost
trivial. Maybe it's so trivial that it is not even copyrighted.
At any rate, in case it should turn out to be copyrighted by me,
I hereby release it under the same terms as pandoc (that is to say,
under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 2 or later).

Please apply my patch to the Debian package and forward my wishlist
bug report upstream.

Thanks for your time and dedication!
Bye.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (800, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.14.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages pandoc depends on:
ii  libc6            2.26-4
ii  libffi6          3.2.1-8
ii  libgmp10         2:6.1.2+dfsg-1.2
ii  liblua5.1-0      5.1.5-8.1+b2
ii  libluajit-5.1-2  2.1.0~beta3+dfsg-5.1
ii  libpcre3         2:8.39-8
ii  libyaml-0-2      0.1.7-2
ii  pandoc-data      1.19.2.4~dfsg-1
ii  zlib1g           1:1.2.8.dfsg-5

pandoc recommends no packages.

Versions of packages pandoc suggests:
pn  context                    <none>
ii  pandoc-citeproc            0.10.5.1-1+b1
ii  texlive-latex-extra        2017.20180110-1
ii  texlive-latex-recommended  2017.20180110-1
pn  texlive-luatex             <none>
ii  texlive-xetex              2017.20180110-1
pn  wkhtmltopdf                <none>

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