What are the pandoc command line options to color and underline hyperlinks in PDF output?

Question

Basically the title question -- I want the links in my pdf document to be blue and underlined (instead of hidden).

Answer 1

A half solution, which colors the links is:

pandoc -o output.pdf --variable colorlinks=true input.md

Answer 2

The full solution involves setting the underline in the markdown file

[[Link text]{.underline}](http://www.google.com)

as per the 8.12.6 in the documentation. Note I had to install ulem.sty from CTAN. The span based approach might work too, didn't test it.

Then include the --variable colorlinks=true in the pandoc command:

pandoc -o output.pdf --variable colorlinks=true input.md