Arguments in "Create a PDF" are in the wrong order

[zspitz]

The manual, under the section Creating a PDF states:

To produce a PDF, specify an output file with a .pdf extension:

pandoc test.txt -o test.pdf

AFAICT the arguments are in the wrong order; the input file has to follow all other arguments.

pandoc -o test.pdf test.txt

I stumbled on this because I kept on getting Unexpected newline when doing something similar in a GitHub Action.

[tarleb]

What you are seeing is not a pandoc problem, but caused by the way you are interacting with the pandoc docker image: when calling docker, the first argument is expected to be the executable to run in the container. Usually, that will be pandoc, but could also be bash etc. However, we try to detect if no executable was given, in which case pandoc is assumed. This detection works best if the first argument is an option, but seems to have failed in your case.

You could raise an issue on pandoc/dockerfiles if you believe the auto detection could be improved.

[jgm]

That's correct: in pandoc they can be in either order.