Add and customise title page when converting from MD to ODT

[jchwenger]

Hi everyone,

I've been digging into customizing my markdown to odt pipeline, adding pagebreaks with lua filters, using metadata.yaml as a separate file for title and author, and such niceties.

Yet so far one thing escapes me. I have modified the reference.odt file in ~/.local/share/pandoc to have, for instance, a page break after "author" (there might be better ways to create a title page, e.g. add a page break in the yaml file instead, still looking into this), and in reference.odt I changed that first page, where I have "TItlle" and "author", to have the First Page format, and had the page number begin at 1 after it. I save, but unlike other changes I made, this has no effect.

Is it because the changes made (e.g. adding a page break to the 'Author' style) are saved to reference.odt as a document, and not to its style? Is there a way to automate the creation of a title page without page numbers?

I should say I'm on MacOS Sonoma 14.0 with pandoc 3.1.8 from Homebrew.

Thanks a lot in advance!

[jgm]

Is it because the changes made (e.g. adding a page break to the 'Author' style) are saved to reference.odt as a document, and not to its style?

Exactly. Only style changes matter. Is it possible to adjust the author style to add a page break after?

Have you played around with modifying the opendocument template? This is used by the ODT writer, because the content is in opendocument format.

[jchwenger]

Oh, sorry, I might not have been too clear: playing around with the opendocument template works like a charm, and I am able to add a page break after a style (like author).

My question now is: is it possible also to have an automatically generated first page format for the title page, without page numbers, and the page numbers starting after? I can save the opendocument template with this, but that has no effect... I suppose that might stretch the limits of conversion?