Do not fail on nonexistent metadata files

[avidseeker]

I have defaults.yaml that I use for documents in specific project structure:

metadata-files:
  - ../meta.yml
  - ../../meta.yml

and I would like to use the same defaults file for files outside that project. Can pandoc just assume that metadata was not provided instead of failing on Could not find metadata file ../metadata.yml?

[tarleb]

A better method might be to use a filter that looks for metadata files, reads them with pandoc.read, and then adds the result to the document.

local function find_metadata_files()
  -- implement
end

function Pandoc (doc)
  for _, filename in ipairs(find_metadata_files()) do
    doc = doc .. pandoc.read(io.open(filename):read 'a', 'markdown')
  end
  return doc
end

[avidseeker]

Metadata are yaml files, doesn't that adds them as markdown files? If that is changed to yamls then Error: Unknown input format yaml.

[jgm]

I think that failing is the right thing to do in this case. The filter may be a good workaround for you.