Pandoc generation of pdf from markdown 4th header is rendered differently

Question

I am using pandoc to generate a pdf from some markdown. I am using h1 through h4 via hash symbols. Example h1=#, h4=####. When I generate my document like this:

pandoc input.md -o output.pdf

I get a document where h1, h2 and h3 have a newline after them but h4 does not have a new line. The text starts on the same line as the header (it isn't formatted the same way, but there isn't a newline character between).

I've tried adding spaces after the #### and adding manual line returns using my editor but nothing seems to work.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

pandoc generates PDFs via LaTeX. In LaTeX, "headers" are generated using the following commands:

1. \section
2. \subsection
3. \subsubsection
4. \paragraph
5. \subparagraph

As you can see, a "level four heading" corresponds to the \paragraph command, which is rendered as you describe. There simply isn't a \subsubsubsection command to use.

The only way to get what you want is to redefine the \paragraph command, which is quite tricky. I haven't been able to make it work with Pandoc.

Answer 2

While the mentioned solutions work fine, pandoc offers a build-in variable to enable block-headings for \paragraph.

pandoc -s -o out.pdf some.md -V block-headings

Pandoc Manual