Pandoc fontawesome in Markdown -> Xelatex -> pdf

Question

I want to use fontawesome symbols in an md yaml-block that then get converted into latex and from there to pdf.

I used the fontawesome package in xelatex and I tried to convert a string in an md yaml-block to something like \faTwitter in latex. It didn't work, though. Pandoc either deletes the string so that it cannot render from xelatex to pdf, or it interprets it as literal, which also prevents xelatex from rendering it.

any idea how to use fontawesome with markdown and pandoc?

Answer 1

This seems to work:

---
header-includes:
    - '\defaultfontfeatures{Extension = .otf}'
    - '\usepackage{fontawesome}'
author: '\faTwitter @Author'
title: 'Title'
---

# My Paper
\faTwitterSquare @Author

Then run pandoc like this: pandoc filename.md --pdf-engine=xelatex -o filename.pdf