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

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

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

Answer 2

pandoc generates PDFs via LaTeX. In LaTeX, "headers" are generated using the following commands:
\section
\subsection
\subsubsection
\paragraph
\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 3

While #tarleb’s answer is surely the best (except that it specifies a
wrong amount of vertical space), here is a “simpler” (by some measure)
but more hacky (in LaTeX terms at least) solution which optionally uses a Pandoc Lua filter or a LaTeX hack but avoids loading another LaTeX package.
We want the LaTeX source to look something like this:
\hypertarget{level-4-heading}{%
\paragraph{Level 4 heading}\label{level-4-heading}}
\hfill
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
This LaTeX looks awful, but if you don’t need to keep or share the LaTeX
source it does what you probably want: a space between the level 4
heading and the paragraph after it equal to the space between a level 3
heading and the paragraph after it.
Here is how it works: since a \hfill on a line on its own is about as
close as you can get to an empty paragraph in LaTeX you get a first
paragraph — the one running in with the heading — containing only
horizontal white space until the end of the line, and then immediately
after a new paragraph — the actual first paragraph after the heading —
with just a normal paragraph space between it and the heading. This
probably also upsets LaTeX’s idea about what a \paragraph should be
like as little as possible.
The “manual” way to do this is as follows:
#### Level 4 heading
````{=latex}
\hfill
````
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
This uses Pandoc’s relatively new raw markup syntax — the “code block”
is actually a raw LaTeX block — but it looks even more awful than the
resulting LaTeX source! It is also a tedious chore to have to insert
this after every level 4 heading. In other words you want to insert that
raw LaTeX automatically, and that can be done with a Lua filter:
--[======================================================================[
latex-h4-break.lua - Pandoc filter to get break after a level 4 heading.
Usage:
$ pandoc --lua-filter latex-h4-break.lua input.md -o output.pdf
--]======================================================================]
-- create it once, use it many times!
local hfill_block = pandoc.RawBlock('latex', '\\hfill')
function Header (elem)
if 4 == elem.level then
return { elem, hfill_block }
else -- ignore headings at other levels!
return nil
end
end
However you can also do a simple LaTeX hack in a header-includes
metadata block to get the same effect:
---
header-includes:
- |
``` {=latex}
\let\originAlParaGraph\paragraph
\renewcommand{\paragraph}[1]{\originAlParaGraph{#1} \hfill}
```
---
#### Level 4 heading
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
This works by first creating an “alias” of the \paragraph command and
then redefining the \paragraph command itself, using the alias in the
new definition so that now wherever the LaTeX source created by Pandoc
contains \paragraph{Foo} it is if it instead had contained
\paragraph{Foo} \hfill which does what we want with zero extra
dependencies! (In case you wonder the wacky spelling of the “aliased”
command is to minimize the risk that it collides with anything which
already exists, since the TeX \let command doesn’t check for that. We
certainly don’t want to overwrite any existing command!)
NOTE: If you really should want more or less space than a normal
paragraph break after the heading just add an appropriate \vspace
command after the \hfill: \hfill \vspace{-0.5\parskip}.

Answer 4

Shifting Headers
Arguably the best way to solve this would be to avoid the problem altogether by shifting what a level 4 header corresponds to. The default for pandoc is to use \section commands for 1st level and \paragraph for 4th level headers. This can be altered via the --top-level-division parameter:
--top-level-division=[default|section|chapter|part]
Treat top-level headers as the given division type in LaTeX [...] output. The hierarchy order is part, chapter, then section; all headers are shifted such that the top-level header becomes the specified type. The default behavior is to determine the best division type via heuristics [...]
So with --top-level-division=chapter, a 4th-level header would be generated via the \subsubsection command.
Styling via LaTeX
If this is not an option, the next best way is to configure the layout of the corresponding LaTeX command: for level-four headers, this is \paragraph by default. The following methods are taken from TeX StackExchange answers.
Please also check the answer by bpj, which is much simpler than what's proposed below.
Default document-classes
The default way would be to configure \paragraph via the titlesec package. We can use the header-includes metadata field for this, which pandoc will include in the intermediate LaTeX document.
---
header-includes: |
``` {=latex}
\usepackage{titlesec}
\titlespacing*{\paragraph}{0pt}{1ex}{-\parskip}
\titleformat{\paragraph}[hang]
{\normalfont\bfseries}
{}
{0pt}
{}
```
---
KOMA document-classes
Using titlesec won't work properly for documents using KOMA classes (like scrartcl), as KOMA has it's own ways of doing things. For these, use this alternative snippet:
---
documentclass: scrartcl
header-includes: |
``` {=latex}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\paragraph{\#startsection{paragraph}{4}{\z#}%
{-3.25ex \#plus -1ex \#minus -0.2ex}%
{0.01pt}%
{\raggedsection\normalfont\sectfont\nobreak\size#paragraph}%
}
\makeatother
```
---

Answer 5

I am not sure, why, but this works for me:
Put $\ \\ $ in the first line after your #### headline