Pandoc is a powerfull tool for converting documents. One of its powers is its ability to convert logical markup into formatting that is good enough for online and paper publishers. In particular academic publishers developed extensive guidelines on formatting Word documents.
Earlier versions of Pandoc Docx Writer were not particularly good at features such as fancy document heads, tables, etc. The limitations were so big that Andrew Heiss suggested creating OOXML documents via Open Document Format.
Version 1.13 (Aug, 2014) introduced handling of Abstracts and Subtitles, and many other improvements.
Yet other Metadata blocks like structured Author fields are not yet supported. JGM himself wrote in 2015 that
there is nothing that works like a template [for creating docx output].
There are some of the features that are often requested by academic publishers:
- abstract formatting (since 1.13)
- subtitle formatting (since 1.13)
- custom styles (since 1.18)
- author list
- structured author blocks
- keywords
- footnotes
- inline and display mathematical formulas
- two-column formatting
- tables and logos in the header
Probably there are more.
When collaborating on a document it is always important to agree on a minimal tool version that would be good enough for use.
It seems handy to have a list of minimal pandoc versions that support each particular feature output to Word Docx, that is Office Open XML (OOXML) format.
