Markdown writer: fully customizable list markers

[jraygauthier]

Describe your proposed improvement and the problem it solves.

I would like to be able to fully customize the produced ordered and unordered list markers in Markdown output.

The UL bullet marker appear to have a solution via PR #1826. There seems to be no similar OL marker customization issue/PR tough.

The method of configuration seems to be in discussion at #5584.

Here, I am mostly interested by the spaces around the markers. Could pandoc provide a way to customize those? A couple of potential approaches:

• bullet_before, bullet_total (applicable to both UL and OL, potential fallback if UL/OL specific option not provided)
• ul_bullet_before, ul_bullet_total, ol_bullet_before, ol_bullet_total (preferred)
• ul_bullet_before, ul_bullet_total, ol_bullet_before, ol_bullet_total
• ul_bullet_before, ul_bullet_after, ol_bullet_before, ol_bullet_after
• *_single_* vs *_multi_* variants useful? Like https://github.com/DavidAnson/markdownlint/blob/v0.34.0/doc/md030.md.
• Could existing --tab-stop option (which currently does not appear to have any bearing on lists' style) be reused alongside with *bullet_before?

For the OL bullet marker, I assume one could pick between 1. and #. (extension needed).

This would allow me to use pandoc to format / prettify the markdown files I work with. The current hardcoded choice does not match my preferred style. As I use lists a lot, this is quite annoying which prevents me from using pandoc as my auto formatter (or any other tool by the way as none appear to provide this feature).

Desired result (Test.md, 1 space before markers, within a total of 4 space width):

# Test

 -  Unordered A.

    Text block.

 -  Unordered B.

    Text block.

 1. Ordered A.

    Text block.

 2. Ordered B.

    Text block.

Current pandoc markdown output (close to desired, but not quite there, no space before the marker):

$ pandoc Test.md --to markdown
# Test

-   Unordered A.

    Text block.

-   Unordered B.

    Text block.

1.  Ordered A.

    Text block.

2.  Ordered B.

    Text block.

Current commonmark markdown output (this one is oddly inconsistent in between ol an ul and doesn't appear to be influenced by --tab-stop):

$ pandoc Test.md --to commonmark
# Test

- Unordered A.

  Text block.

- Unordered B.

  Text block.

1.  Ordered A.

    Text block.

2.  Ordered B.

    Text block.

[jgm]

I'm reluctant to go down this path. There are ever so many choices that might be made in rendering markdown, and everyone has their own stylistic preferences. Allowing this to be configurable would add a lot of code complexity (hence also bugs and maintenance time).

[jgm]

For some other examples of similar requests:

• Ugly pipe table output #10453 (non-aligned pipe tables)
• A command-line option to use fenced or indented code blocks only #10290 (select between fenced and indented code blocks)
• Remove spaces after list marker #7172 (avoid spaces after list marker)
• Markdown writer: flag for generating inline rather than reference-style footnotes #2567 (generate inline footnotes)
• Feature Request: choose --reference-link type #2698 (customize reference links)
• Config file for markdown output options? #5584 (config file for md options, noted in your issue above)

[jgm]

Either we ignore all such requests, or we provide a way to address them all. This would probably involve a config file as in #5584. But then I can imagine similar requests for other formats, e.g. RST. The complexity starts to get out of hand.

[jraygauthier]

I can understand your reluctance, pandoc is already a pretty large and complex piece of software. At least, the issue has been filed. I wanted to make sure this aspect was mentioned for completeness were you to go forward with #5584 😃.