Unable to export markdown files with devanagari characters

Question

Running emacs 25.2.2. And markdown installed from Melpa.

If I export a file with devanagari characters, it produces a file sans devanagari characters!

I did a bit of research and found out that markdown test.md -o test.html issued from a command line does similarly. But pandoc -o test.html test.md works properly. So, this could be a bug in markdown command as provided by discount package on my Kubuntu 18.04.

So, I customized markdown-command to pandoc. That did not help. So, I customized markdown-command-needs-filename to t. That produces gibberish for devanagari characters.

Is there a way out? What do I need to do to get markdown export going?

Or, how do I set pandoc as my command to execute while exporting a markdown file?

Answer 1

You can try to implement a function like this:

(defun pandoc-md2html ()
  "Compile markdown file to HTML, using pandoc."
  (interactive)
  (when buffer-file-name
    (message "Pandoc markdown to HTML compilation...")
    (shell-command
     (concat "pandoc"
             " -o "
             (concat (file-name-base) ".html")
             " "
             buffer-file-name))))