Creating info boxes in markdown

[naranek]

I'm writing markdown documents which will be converted to a bunch of different formats, so compatibility and interoperability are key.

I want to use info boxes like this to make the documents easier to understand:

The method with the greatest compatibility across systems seems to be to create a table with a single cell, and put the contents inside it. However - writing markdown tables with multiline rows is absolute horror. There are so many problems that it really isn't feasible. I'd also like to have bullets etc. advanced formatting inside the box.

Question: Can I somehow convert blockquotes, code blocks or other similar entities to tables somehow? Like using a lua filter or something? Any other solutions to this?

Blockquotes work well in some systems, so it would be best if I could use them as the source formatting, but anything that solves the problem will do :)

[TomBener]

Perhaps you could try Quarto's Callout Blocks: https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/callouts.html

[wlupton]

writing markdown tables with multiline rows is absolute horror.

You could use the list-table filter?

[jgm]

It would be easy to create a filter that makes a table from a BlockQuote.

function BlockQuote(el)
  return pandoc.utils.from_simple_table(
    pandoc.SimpleTable( {}, {"AlignLeft"}, {1.0}, {}, {{el.content}} )
  )
end

Probably better to use a fenced Div with a class instead, if you might need block quotes for their original purposes sometimes....

[naranek]

Oh yes! This does the the trick. Thank you so much :)

For anyone else with similar requirements, here's a version which will also keep single-element blockquotes intact.

function BlockQuote(el)

  if (#el.content) > 1 then
    return pandoc.utils.from_simple_table(
      pandoc.SimpleTable( {}, {"AlignLeft"}, {1.0}, {}, {{el.content}} )
    )
  end
end