acknowledgments-section

Filter that ensures that "Acknowledgments" sections are handled as expected.

Acknowledgments in a dedicated section

This filter allows to write document acknowledgments as normal sections in the main text. It moves any section titled "acknowledgments" from the main text into the metadata. Most output format templates expect the thanks section (acknowledgments) to be given as part of the metadata, but writing body text is easier and more natural. This extension is also written with typst in mind and allows for a personalised placement of the acknowledgments section where ever in the paper or report.

# Acknowledgments

Place acknowledgments here.

Multiple paragraphs are possible.

Without this filter, the acknowledgments would need to be placed in the document's metadata. The additional indentation and formatting requirements in YAML headers are frequently perceived as confusing or annoying, especially when writing longer texts.

---
acknowledgments: |
  Place acknowledgments here.

  Multiple paragraphs are possible.
---

This filter modifies the document such that the acknowledgments section behaves as if it was passed as metadata. It does so by looking for a top-level header whose ID is acknowledgments. Pandoc auto-creates IDs based on header contents, so a header titled Acknowledgment will satisfy this condition.^[1]

[1]: This requires the auto_identifier extension. It is enabled by default.

The Acknowledgments can be placed anywhere in the document.

The filter assumes that the acknowledgments runs up until the next heading.

Usage

The filter modifies the internal document representation; it can be used with many publishing systems that are based on pandoc.

Plain pandoc

Pass the filter to pandoc via the --lua-filter (or -L) command line option.

pandoc --lua-filter acknowledgments-section.lua ...

Quarto

Users of Quarto can install this filter as an extension with

quarto install extension tockudex/acknowledgments-section

and use it by adding acknowledgments-section to the filters entry in their YAML header.

---
filters:
  - acknowledgments-section
---

R Markdown

Use pandoc_args to invoke the filter. See the R Markdown Cookbook for details.

---
output:
  word_document:
    pandoc_args: ['--lua-filter=acknowledgments-section.lua']
---

License

This pandoc Lua filter is published under the MIT license, see file LICENSE for details.