Suggestion: MS writer, preserve image name

[teoric]

Currently (pandoc 2.1.2), pandoc's ms writer drops the complete image from the source

![DESCRIPTION](images/image) 

becomes

[IMAGE: DESCRIPTION]

But it seems to become so useful that I would suggest to make the file name available somehow; that way, one can make use of it when working with the ms document, and get a nice PS/PDF out of it. The following would be very unobtrusive markup-wise:

.PSPIC "images/name" WIDTH HEIGHT
[IMAGE: DESCRIPTION]

(Only provide WIDTH and HEIGHT if defined in the original document in useful units. Potentially comment them if they are percent values or other useless values.)
This would even work if images/name is an EPS graphic and the file is processed with -Tps, but not give a nice caption. Else, it would be easily replaced by .PDFPIC "images/name" WIDTH HEIGHT, if one cares to do so.
If the resulting error messages are too annoying, or you want to come closer to the LaTeX approach, one could consider the following; this way, tweaking the output to a real figure would be rather simple, and would show a real placeholder.

.KF \" start keep - non-floating with KS
.DS C \" center display
.ANYPIC  "images/name" WIDTH HEIGHT \"   replace this by a call to .PSPIC/.PDFPIC
.CAPTION "[DESCRIPTION 1]"
.DE \" end display
.KE \" end keep

(Only provide WIDTH and HEIGHT if defined in the original document in useful units. Potentially comment them if they are percent values or other useless values.)
and e.g. include in the standard template as a dummy definition:

.de ANYPIC  \" macro to be replaced by user with PSPIC or PDFPIC
\\fC\\$1\\fP
.br
..
.nr IMAGE 0 1 \" register for image number, autoincrement
.de CAPTION
\v'1v'
.\"  nr IMAGE +1
Figure \\n+[IMAGE]. \\fB\\$1\\fP
..

For the term figure, you could rely on the groff localisation efforts (\*[locale]-lifg), but that may be to advanced as you would also have to mso <LANG>.tmac, which only exists for some languages.

[teoric]

I now have a lua filter + ms macro version that works for me and also tries to convert graphics to PDF. I would gladly share this (the Lua part also contains some other stuff; I could prepare a cleaned-up version) if you are interested, but if ms is considered more of a draft format, it might be better to just close this issue.

[jgm]

I'm certainly interested. You might consider sharing your filter on pandoc/lua-filters.
But I see no reason why we shouldn't make the recommended changes, or something like them, in pandoc itself.

[teoric]

Oh, great! So do you want to have a look at the lua filter to see how it handles these changes and then consider what to take from it, and I share the filter for the rest? The relevant parts would be Image for the image code, Table for a somewhat too complicated table wrapper (I actually used graphics within tables to get the right captions with LaTeX and ms, that's why they are related).
I made a repository with the macro definitions for .ANYPIC and the table wrappers as well as some header spacing changes that suit my personal taste better.
Some definitions for integration and the internationalisation are in my little fork of the standard template, which also adds some dynamic line-spacing modifications; changes are rather heavily commented, but I would gladly provide some other format, if that helps; it may be preferable to use Pandoc internationalisation strings if they exist, or let users define them in their preamble; I currently pull them from the groff files, but they are limited to German, English and French.)

[terefang]

is this still broken ?

[jgm]

I just pushed some small improvements (PDF images will now work).
I'm not sure I want to go all the way to using a custom macro, but we might be able to have Text.Pandoc.PDF convert images to PDF before calling the ms writer.

[terefang]

i have tried the lua filter and template enhancements referenced above (from @teoric), but they did not work for me.

[teoric]

I suppose this is not the right place to discuss my enhancements, but I can try to look into problems if you write to me or raise an issue at my repo. One problem that occurs sometimes has to do with the output of some tools, which may be easy to fix locally.

@jgm, PDF inclusion and your further plans sound great, thank you!

[terefang]

@teoric i was only using your filter to see if it was i viable workaround

@jgm i am really interested at improving the ms writer by giving feedback

to explain my situation a little bit better: my use case involves mostly converting markdown to pdf with a ms template that i adapted from the standard.

i also use a pagebreak.lua filter script to align some headers to the start of a new page.

what i now need is to insert full-width images in png/jpg/svg formats.

[teoric]

@terefang I was only trying to tell you that I would be willing to help you exploring/improving viability and that there are some undocumented stumbling blocks and dependencies. (Not documented because nobody has ever expressed interest in using this, and for me, the approach has been viable the few times I needed it ;-).) But I understand now that you are seeking a different solution entirely.

[terefang]

@teoric i understand, thanks, but for me the way forward is to have this in pandoc