Autopublish TechDocs to Confluence

<h1>How to generate DOCX from Markdown</h1>
Markdown is a format, which is usually used for communication and providing documentation
for developers and technical products. Markdown supports a lot of necessary features,
which help with organizing your documentation. 
Yet, for sharing the documents, usually used DOCX standard, which can be edited
via specialized software, despite markdown can be edited in any text editor.
For converting documents, we can use pandoc utility, which can achieve exactly 
desired behavior by converting from one format to another.
Pandoc can be extended by Lua filters and tweaked per our needs. 
<pre><code class="hljs language-lua">local cacheLinks = {} -- Stores the found local links in the repository

function file_exists(name)
 local f=io.open(name,&quot;r&quot;)
 if f~=nil then io.close(f) return true else return false end
end

function Link (link, target, title, attr)
 local linkTarget = link.target -- where the link points to
 if file_exists(linkTarget) then
 print(&quot;Found the link: &quot; .. linkTarget)
 table.insert(cacheLinks, linkTarget)
 return {}, {}, {}, {} -- return empty table, which will remove Link from the flow of the document
 end
 return link
end

function Pandoc(blocks, meta)
 local paragraphs = {}
 for i = 1, #cacheLinks do -- iterate over the local links table
 local fh = io.open(cacheLinks[i]) -- read the contents of that linked file
 local contents = pandoc.read( -- parse it with pandoc with markdown parser
 fh:read &#x27;*a&#x27;,
 &quot;markdown&quot;,
 PANDOC_READER_OPTIONS
 ).blocks
 blocks.blocks:extend(contents) -- append parsed data to the end of the document
 end
 return blocks, meta
end
</code></pre>Then, inside your pipeline, you should call the following:
<pre><code class="hljs language-bash">pandoc --lua-filter fix-links-multiple-files.lua -o output.docx -f markdown -t docx README.md --toc
</code></pre>Photo by Kindel Media: <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-close-up-shot-of-paper-clipped-documents-7054757/">https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-close-up-shot-of-paper-clipped-documents-7054757/</a>