What can I control with YAML header options in pandoc?

Question

Only by chance did I see an example document using the toc: true line in their YAML header options in a Markdown file to be processed by Pandoc. And the Pandoc

Answer 1

It is a rather long list that you can browse by running man pandoc in the command line and navigating to "Variables set by pandoc" section under "TEMPLATES."

The top of the list includes the following among many other options:

Variables set by pandoc
   Some variables are set automatically by pandoc.  These vary somewhat depending  on  the
   output format, but include metadata fields as well as the following:

   title, author, date
          allow identification of basic aspects of the document.  Included in PDF metadata
          through LaTeX and ConTeXt.  These can be set through a pandoc title block, which
          allows for multiple authors, or through a YAML metadata block:

                 ---
                 author:
                 - Aristotle
                 - Peter Abelard
                 ...

   subtitle
          document subtitle; also used as subject in PDF metadata

   abstract
          document summary, included in LaTeX, ConTeXt, AsciiDoc, and Word docx

   keywords
          list  of  keywords  to  be  included in HTML, PDF, and AsciiDoc metadata; may be
          repeated as for author, above

   header-includes
          contents specified by -H/--include-in-header (may have multiple values)

   toc    non-null value if --toc/--table-of-contents was specified

   toc-title
          title of table of contents (works only with EPUB and docx)

   include-before
          contents specified by -B/--include-before-body (may have multiple values)

   include-after
          contents specified by -A/--include-after-body (may have multiple values)

   body   body of document

```