Support "style for following paragraph" in docx writer

[benniekiss]

In MS Word, when I define custom styles, I can also define the style of the paragraph that follows. This is helpful when defining headings and setting the appropriate indentation for body text.

However, when I convert markdown documents to docx, it does not apply those styles to text following headings, it applies First Paragraph and Body Text styles.

I can get around this using fenced divs and declaring custom styles, but I was wondering if it is possible to make pandoc apply the "styles for following paragraphs" automatically.

[rnwst]

If you only need this for setting appropriate indentation after headings, you can simply modify the First Paragraph style in your reference.docx to have the desired indentation.

AFAIK, there isn't currently a way to make pandoc apply the "style for the following paragraph". In my view, implementing this would also be a bad idea. Say for example you have a CodeBlock following a Header. If the Header has a "style for the following paragraph" defined and pandoc were to take this into account, the CodeBlock will probably no longer look like a CodeBlock, and might instead just look like e.g. a regular paragraph. I can see how this would lead to unexpected results and confusion.

[benniekiss]

Unfortunately, I need different levels of indentation for different headings, so I can't globally change First Paragraph and Body.

I understand the issues around implementing this, and I can get around it just by declaring a custom style in a fenced div, so it's not blocking anything. But it does add a little bit of complexity.

If anything, for my use case, "style for following paragraph" would really only need to apply to text that would otherwise be styled with Body or First Paragraph, if not explicitly declared, since these are generally applied to any unstyled/unformatted text when converting from markdown.

[rnwst]

If you are concerned about the ugliness of your Markdown's fenced Divs or would like to automate this, you could write a Lua filter to automatically apply custom styles to paragraphs following Headers (and the applied style could depend on the level of the preceding Header). I'm happy to help with this if it's something you're interested in.

[benniekiss]

Thank you for the offer, but I'm not too concerned about how the markdown looks. It's just more so a complexity in keeping the docx style document in sync with the markdown. I already use jinja templates to appy the necessary styles per heading, so it's not an issue of automating it.