Pandoc In-Depth Reference

Comprehensive reference for pandoc, the universal document converter. Covers CLI usage, format support, extensions, defaults files, templates, filters, citations, PDF generation, specialized output formats, pandoc Markdown, and the internal Haskell architecture.

Data Flow

input file(s)
  → reader (format-specific parser)
    → Pandoc AST (Meta + [Block])
      → filters (JSON / Lua / citeproc, applied sequentially)
        → internal transforms (headerShift, line breaks, etc.)
          → writer (format-specific renderer)
            → template wrapping (standalone mode)
              → output file

For PDF output, the writer produces an intermediate format (LaTeX, ConTeXt, HTML, or Typst) and an external engine renders the PDF.