Add LaTeX 'tags' to include/exclude sections of Markdown from command line

Question

I would like to be able to "turn on/off" certain sections of my documents, depending on a command line declaration.

I am converting a large group of policy documents that are for both internal and external use, via Pandoc, to PDF, using a LaTeX template, and Pandoc is using pdfTeX. I also have a PowerShell script that converts them recursively.

gci -r -i *.md | foreach{$pdf=$_.directoryname+"\"+$_.basename+".pdf"; pandoc -f markdown --template template.latex -V geometry:margin=1.5cm -V fontfamily:lato -V fontfamilyoptions:default -V fontfamilyoptions:defaultsans -s $_.name -o $pdf}

External versions don't need the document details section, which is the first page after the table of contents. I could probably remove the third page, but there are some documents with long ToC's, and some without, besides which, it doesn't strike me as a an elegant solution.

My typical document looks something like this (YAML and content reduced for brevity):

---
title: "A policy"
documentdetails: True/false % I could add something here for the default?
...

Table of contents:

\documentdetailstart % A tag looking like this for instance

# Document Details

#### Document Details

| Description | Status/Version | Reference Code | Control |
| --- |---|---|---|
|A Policy | Final / 1.0 | LaTeX | All |

\documentdetailend % A tag looking like this for instance

Begin Document

How can I add some kind of wrapping to the markdown of each policy, that is dealt with in the template perhaps, so that I can add something like the below on the command line to automatically omit/include the contents of the tag.

-V Documentdetails:True

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide!

Answer 1

You could have an

\iftrue
Document details
\fi

and tell your powershell script to replace iftrue with iffalse and compile a new copy.

Edit: If you surround all the internal only stuff with \begininternal and \endinternal as below, then you can toggle between whether the document is for an internal or an external copy of the pdf by replacing iffalse with iftrue on the second line. Then you just need to get your script to say "if external, replace iffalse with iftrue and compile" or somesuch.

\documentclass{article}
\let\begininternal\iffalse
\let\endinternal\fi

\begin{document}
Stuff everyone gets

\begininternal
Internal  only stuff
\endinternal

More stuff everyone gets

\begininternal
More internal only stuff
\endinternal

The end.
\end{document}