pandoc does not recognise latex-engine argument

[inkrement]

I am using pandoc 1.13.1 with xelatex, but it seems like pandoc does not recognise the argument:

Christians-iMac-3:dipl chris$ pandoc -r markdown+simple_tables+table_captions+yaml_metadata_block -s -S --latex-engine=xelatex --template=templates/xelatex.template --filter pandoc-citeproc --csl=./csl/ieee.csl --bibliography=/Users/chris/Documents/mendeley/library.bib -o build/diplomarbeit.pdf src/diplomarbeit.md
! Package inputenc Error: Keyboard character used is undefined
(inputenc)                in inputencoding `utf8'.

See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
Type  H <return>  for immediate help.
 ...                                              

l.38 Arbeit verwendeten und fü

Try running pandoc with --latex-engine=xelatex.
pandoc: Error producing PDF from TeX source

[mb21]

I would guess that pandoc does recognize the latex-engine argument, but that the XeTeX engine has trouble with some unicode characters and/or some TeX package loaded, see for example here. Does it work without your custom template?

You could try converting to tex first (with pandoc [...] -o out.tex) and then debug the issue by running XeTeX on the produced file.

[jgm]

We should at least fix pandoc so that the "Try running pandoc with --latex-engine=xelatex" message doesn't appear if they did use xelatex.