Pandoc: Deal with missing images.

[dufferzafar]

Command:

pandoc -s --latex-engine=xelatex https://www.xyplorer.com/whatsnew.php -o file.pdf

Output:

pandoc: Could not find image `img/xyplorer-32.png', skipping...
! Unable to load picture or PDF file 'img/xyplorer-32.png'.
<to be read again> 
                   }
l.67 ...in,height=0.33333in]{img/xyplorer-32.png}}

pandoc: Error producing PDF

What is the suggested way to deal with such issues? Currently, instead of generating a pdf, I generate a latex, and then manually edit that file to remove such missing images from the source and then use xelatex to convert that .tex to pdf.

I understand that there's not much pandoc can do in cases like these, but perhaps there could be a switch which would really _skip_ the images by also removing them from the .tex source.

[dufferzafar]

IMO, This case is quite similar to the encoding errors one which throws up errors like:

! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char 最 (U+6700)
(inputenc)                not set up for use with LaTeX.

See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              

l.1848   最

Try running pandoc with --latex-engine=xelatex.
pandoc: Error producing PDF

And pandoc suggests that running with xelatex might fix things. Something similar for missing images will be nice too!

[tarleb]

Pandoc has this very nice feature called filters. It is perfect for cases like yours and makes it easy to handle such things programmatically. I'd recommend to check it out.

[dufferzafar]

@tarleb Thanks. I'll check them out, and see if I can hack something together.

I still feel that this would be a nice feature addition for the core itself.

[jgm]

Funny, when I tried it pandoc found the image with no problems. Are you perhaps using an older version of pandoc?

[jgm]

Nonetheless I agree. When pandoc can't find the image for formats like PDF, it should replace the broken image link with something else: a span. I'm going to implement this.

[dufferzafar]

@jgm I'm currently on a different machine which has pandoc 1.17.2 and yes, it works. I'm glad you understood the feature request though. 👍