Idea: Support for centred block-level elements, without necessarily needing to revise pandoc

[Gordon Steemson <gsteemso-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

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When I began switching over to Pandoc a couple of months ago, I searched 
extensively for some way to specify centred text in Markdown, and found a 
syntax extension that numerous end-users advocate, but no tool I know of 
supports:

>
> Basically, the Markdown text (potentially contained
> within some larger construct) is bracketed with little
> ASCII-art arrows, like so:
>
> -> This paragraph
> is centred. <-
>
> ### -> This level-3 heading is centred. <- ###
>
> -> This level-1 heading is centred. <-
> ======================================
>

As I said, numerous people online claim this works, but I have yet to 
encounter any software that actually supports it.

It seems simple enough in principle for us end-using peons to support, at 
least when using a custom writer. It appears that any kind of text that 
might qualify for this treatment will be passed to one of Para() or 
Header(), which can then special-case based on finding or not finding 
literal ASCII-art arrows at the beginning and end of the given string 
argument. I conjecture that it might also turn up in Plain(), but I haven’t 
yet figured out just what circumstance causes that function to get called.

There are two obvious questions here that Mr. MacFarlane or someone equally 
“dialled in” to the Pandoc project can save a lot of trial and error by 
answering:

1) If someone, just to be difficult, needs to have literal ASCII arrows at 
the start and/or end of their actual output text block, can it be 
accommodated in a simple way by backslash-escaping? At what stage does that 
get stripped out — before the custom writer functions get called or after?

2) What would be involved in modifying the Pandoc markdown parser to 
recognize the obvious extension to this syntax, demonstrated below?

-> This text should
-> be right-aligned
-> in output formats
-> that support that,
-> without being
-> mistaken for a
-> block quote.

While I’m on the subject…

-> Right-alignment
->   and centering
->    should also…

->   …work with
     irregular
    margins, for
  obvious reasons. <-

If it simplifies anything, I find it difficult to envision a circumstance 
where someone might need a centred or right-aligned block quotation (the 
closest I can come is where someone’s abusing HTML blockquotes to get a 
narrower canvas for part of the document), so the two notations can easily 
be defined as mutually exclusive — a good thing, as it would likely look 
terrible in the original formatting, thus violating a key design goal of 
Markdown.

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