Pandoc equivalent to Sphinx's :download: role

Question

Sphinx defines a role :download: that instructs Sphinx to copy the reference file to _downloads.

Does Pandoc has a similar feature?

Answer 1

Pandoc does not have that feature built-in, but it can be added with a few lines of Lua:

local prefix = 'media'
local path = pandoc.path

function Code (code)
  if code.attributes.role == 'download' then
    local description, filename = code.text:match '(.*) %<(.*)%>$'
    local mimetype, content = pandoc.mediabag.fetch(filename)
    local mediabag_filename = path.join{
      pandoc.utils.sha1(content),
      path.filename(filename)
    }
    if content and mimetype then
      pandoc.mediabag.insert(mediabag_filename, mimetype, content)
    end
    return pandoc.Link(description, path.join{prefix, mediabag_filename})
  end
end

Use the script by saving it to a file download-role.lua and the call pandoc with

pandoc --lua-filter=download-role.lua --extract-media=media ...

This will also work when using Markdown:

`this example script <../example.py>`{role=download}