Add Markdown/DOCX → NIME PDF pipeline via pandoc

[cpmpercussion]

Adds an alternative authoring route: write a NIME paper in Markdown (with YAML front matter) or convert from a Word .docx and render it to a NIME-formatted PDF using the same nimeart LaTeX class as the existing .tex templates.

Usage

make md-pdf                              # builds the example -> example.pdf
make md-pdf   SRC=mypaper.md
make docx-pdf SRC=mypaper.docx META=mypaper-meta.yaml
make docx-md  SRC=mypaper.docx           # extract .docx -> editable Markdown

Requires pandoc 3.x in addition to the existing LaTeX toolchain.

What's included (pandoc/)

• nime.latex — custom pandoc template mapping YAML front matter onto the nimeart/acmart front-matter commands (title, authors, affiliations, abstract, keywords, teaser, acknowledgments).
• nime-tables.lua — renders Markdown tables as table+tabular floats.
• nime-defaults.yaml — pandoc options (natbib + ACM-Reference-Format, template, filter, variables).
• example.md / example-meta.yaml — worked examples covering every supported field.
• README.md — metadata reference and usage docs.

Plus Makefile targets (md-pdf, docx-pdf, docx-md), top-level README.md section, and .gitignore rules for generated outputs.

Notes on the integration

acmart/nimeart provides its own fonts, hyperref, and geometry, so the template omits pandoc's font/geometry partials. Three issues found and fixed during real compilation:

1. \Bbbk clash — don't reload amssymb; acmart provides maths via newtxmath.
2. longtable not in 1-column mode — pandoc emits longtable for every table, which fails in two-column sigconf; the Lua filter converts them to tabular floats.
3. Duplicate \bibliographystyle — now exactly one (ACM-Reference-Format), so bibtex picks the right style.

Both pipelines were verified to compile end-to-end (pandoc → pdflatex + bibtex) and the rendered PDFs were visually checked.

Known limitation

Pandoc only parses [@key] citation syntax from Markdown-family input, not from .docx text. For cited work the Markdown path (or docx-md → md-pdf) is recommended. Documented in pandoc/README.md.

Not included

CI is left untouched — the existing xu-cheng/latex-action container may not bundle pandoc. Happy to add a CI job for this pipeline if wanted.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[cpmpercussion]

let's keep this one in draft as an example pipeline for working in dox and then moving directly to pdf.