courtdoc

Some experimental work on using Pandoc, LaTeX and Markdown to create court documents from version-controllable plain text sources.

Examples

Invocation

Build the Markdown document in foo.md:

> ./build foo

You'll either get a nice foo.pdf, or an incomprehensible LaTeX error message.

Dependencies

build is just a short shell script which calls pandoc and xelatex, so you'll need those on your PATH.

You can modify build so that pandoc is responsible for choosing its own LaTeX engine, but I wanted to use nice fonts and couldn't get pandoc to call XeTeX.

Writing your document (Markdown + YAML)

Use order.md or subs.md as a starting point. You can write anything that's supported in Pandoc-flavoured Markdown, including any extensions enabled in the build script. I'm using yaml_metadata_block, citations and footnotes.

Modifying metadata (YAML)

All documents are assumed to be court documents relating to the same action, defined in header.yaml. The structure of this YAML file is pretty self-explanatory; Pandoc feeds this YAML to the data you add in the block at the top of your Markdown file into courtdoc.template.tex, so the allowable keywords are all variables in that template.

Modifying the template (LaTeX)

The template is defined in courtdoc.template.tex and is based on the style used in Western Australia. You can see how the keys in header.yaml and the YAML metadata block at the start of each document are fed into variables like $foo$ . There are also a few special template keywords like $if$ , $for$ and $sep$ . This code isn't really LaTeX, it's a little-documented Pandoc DSL which is compiled to an intermediate .tex file before build invokes xelatex.

This templating language is fairly limited. A more sophisticated system might involve Haskell scripts which parse custom Markdown features using Text.Pandoc.JSON. See the Pandoc scripting documentation.

njm2112/courtdoc