Look for data files of all kinds in data dir subdirectories

[bpj]

Describe the problem

Currently Pandoc supports looking for data files in the directories

• $DATADIR/filters
• $DATADIR/defaults
• $DATADIR/metadata
• $DATADIR/templates
• $DATADIR/csl

but the following potentially equally useful data subdirectories are not currently supported:

• $DATADIR/reference-docs

• $DATADIR/abbreviations

• $DATADIR/highlight†

• $DATADIR/includes‡

• $DATADIR/bibliographies

Notes to the above list:

• †: for both highlighting styles and syntax definitions

• ‡: for both header and body includes

so I wonder if there are any reasons not to support any or all of these, and similarly for other kinds of data files which may be added in the future and/or I have missed above.

Some reasons why this may be a good idea:

• Consistency with those already supported.
• Otherwise there is a strong incentive to just drop everything into the root of $DATADIR which is messy and hard to maintain.
• Ease of (local) deployment:
  • You can have people put everything in the appropriate subdirectories (or put them there for them)¹
  • People can then use simple file names on the command line, without having to remember/be told that they have to use a full path in some cases but not in others. (This last is an issue even if you have a predefined environment variable PANDOC_DATADIR vel sim. or use ${USERDATA} in a defaults file!)
  • Having separate directories makes it easier to use a consistent naming scheme for example for a filter and a related reference doc.

Alternative solutions

Tell people/train yourself to consistently using a predefined prefix environment variable like the above-mentioned PANDOC_DATADIR, and ${USERDATA} in defaults files. This shouldn’t really be necessary.

Related

• Abbreviations directory in user data directory #8520

P.S.

I hope implementing this for all kinds of data files makes it easier rather than harder to implement!
Unfortunately I can't see myself learning Haskell, so I depend on people's good will to implement it.

Footnotes

1. In most (all?) modern GUIs you can just drop a directory containing properly named subdirectories on the user data directory and they will be automatically merged. ↩