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I followed the instructions in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/52131435/510024 and I could manage to create and use a filter to create a new page whenever I want in a conversion from markdown to docx. With that I could manage to get a 'Cover/Front Page' in the docx file. However when using --toc option the filter doesn't work. The newpage is not respected and the 'TOC' appears right after the document title i.e in the same page.

There is a way to convert from markdown to docx having as result a docx document with a 'Cover/Front Page' and the 'TOC' (i.e. the 'TOC' being displayed in a page after the 'Cover/Front Page')

Thanks!

avaz
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1 Answers1

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There are (at least) two possible methods: one which requires changes to the input document, and another where one modifies the reference document.

Adding a page break to the abstract

The abstract is the last element before the table of contents. Ending the abstract with a page break will cause the toc to start on a new page:

---
title: MWE
abstract: ' `<w:p><w:r><w:br w:type="page"/></w:r></w:p>`{=openxml}'
---

Note that the abstract may not be empty, but adding a single no-break space, as demonstrated in above example, is enough.

Modifying the reference document

Pandoc uses a reference document when creating docx files. It is possible to create a custom reference doc and to modify the TOCHeader style.

Creating a custom reference doc requires the following steps:

  1. Create a new docx based on pandoc's default reference file:

    pandoc --print-default-data-file reference.docx > custom-reference.docx

  2. Open custom-reference.docx and modify the styles in it to your liking.

  3. Pass the result via the --reference-doc option each time when invoking pandoc.

    pandoc --reference-doc=custom-reference.docx …

    Alternatively, rename the file to reference.docx and place it in pandoc's data directory, so it is chosen as default.

See the documentation on how to modify a custom style for details.

tarleb
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    Sorry for the late response, couldn't test this earlier. I tried both options and decided for the second as it is more clean. Cheers! – avaz Oct 23 '18 at 11:15
  • If you are following the second approach from tarleb's answer, and you run into an issue with the template file being corrupted. It's a known issue with powershell. Use cmd instead. Here is the reported issue: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/4758 – Stephen Wike Feb 21 '22 at 18:08