Obtaining babel-french automatic spaces before punctuation when using pandoc

Question

I'm trying to get pandoc (which converts Markdown to PDF using LaTeX) to produce PDFs which respect French typesetting rules concerning non-breakable spaces.

The suggestions here do not seem to work, e.g. pandoc test.md -V lang:fr-FR -o test.pdf or pandoc test.md -M lang:fr-FR -o test.pdf.

What am I missing? I'm using pandoc 2.7.3 on Ubuntu 16.04. The goal is to start with a Markdown file text.md such as a;b and to obtain in output a PDF file showing a ;b where the space is non-breakable.

Answer 1

The default pandoc template for LaTeX output appears to force shorthands=off in the babel options. Indeed, after running pandoc -D latex >default.latex, you should see:

\PassOptionsToPackage{unicode=true}{hyperref} % options for packages loaded elsewhere

(...)

$if(lang)$
\ifnum 0\ifxetex 1\fi\ifluatex 1\fi=0 % if pdftex
  \usepackage[shorthands=off,$for(babel-otherlangs)$$babel-otherlangs$,$endfor$main=$babel-lang$]{babel}
$if(babel-newcommands)$
  $babel-newcommands$
$endif$
\else

(...)

\end{document}

This shorthands=off option kills the feature you want. You can fix this the following way:

1. Get the default LaTeX template in a file called mytemplate.latex:

   pandoc -D latex >mytemplate.latex
   

2. In mytemplate.latex, use your favorite text editor to remove the shorthands=off option passed to babel.

3. Compile with:

   pandoc -f markdown -t latex -M lang:fr-FR --template=mytemplate -o test.pdf test.md
   

This should work if mytemplate.latex is either in the current directory or in ~/.pandoc/templates.