Suggesting SILE as alternative PDF engine for Pandoc

[Omikhleia]

Long ago (jgm/pandoc#6087) there were attempts to bring SIL syntax support to Pandoc.

Let's think in a different way. (I'll be a bit bit tongue in cheek, with also #1866 in mind...)

With SILE + markdown.sile, or even better SILE + resilient.sile, you also get the pandocast module: the Pandoc (JSON) AST is supported as direct input. It was (and is still a bit) experimental when I initiated it, but then I'm having this idea... With a SILE distribution including these dependencies, it could be interesting to propose Pandoc's --pdf-engine to use this leveraged SILE as native PDF rendering engine directly, instead of TeX.
This is probably a simpler patch on Pandoc's side than bringing a whole new (and as-of-yet incomplete) "input language". This could also get some interesting traction towards SILE.

Am I totally dreaming?

EDIT: But on a second thought we don't even have to use the pandocast route. Since Pandoc supports Djot, and my reading of the --pdf-engine logic (it converts the input to some intermediate target, and invokes LaTeX/conTeXt/roff/wkhtmltopdf as appropriate), then we could as well use the Djot route.
However done,

• pandoc input.xxx -o output.pdf --pdf-engine sile uses SILE with whatever intermediate format we want to push on (djot, markdown profile with appropriate extensions, or pandoc AST).
• Or even (a big leap of faith) pandoc somefile.xxx -t djot -o output.pdf (= assume we push for SILE to be the default PDF renderer for Djot)...

[alerque]

Am I totally dreaming?

No. This is a good plan, and basically where I started going with the current Pandoc package anyway.

I still think having an actual Haskell writer is a good idea too (for a different set of use cases involving embedding inline code in other languages) but that doesn't exclude this direction at all, and in fact nicely jives with it.

[Omikhleia]

Yup. By chance, would you have somewhere a Dockerfile for building your modified Pandoc from its sources, so to possibly get "bootstrapped" and (finally) give it a try?