First, note that only initial indentation of lines is significant in line blocks; internal consecutive spaces will be collapsed anyway.

Second, --preserve-tabs does apparently have an effect, but it's not what you'd expect;

% printf "|\thi" | pandoc -t native
[ LineBlock [ [ Str "\160\160hi" ] ] ]
% printf "|\thi" | pandoc -t native --preserve-tabs
[ Para [ Str "|" , Space , Str "hi" ] ]
% printf "| \thi" | pandoc -t native --preserve-tabs
[ LineBlock [ [ Str "\160hi" ] ] ]

You should go ahead and put something about this on the bug tracker.

> On Oct 12, 2022, at 2:47 AM, Alcuin York <alcu...-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> From my own understanding of the pandoc manual, it seems that the --preserve-tabs option does not apply to line_blocks. And from my own attempts this also appears to be the case. So, 2 questions:
>
> 1. Is this correct (--preserve-tabs does not apply to line_blocks).
>
> 2. If yes to 1, would it be possible to incorporate it into pandoc?
>
>
>
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