It appears that the Markdown reader, as a rule, treats any unknown environment as block-level content (rather than inline). While this seems to be the desired behaviour, it has side effects when the output format is (newline-sensitive) LaTeX. This was previously reported here:
This affects users wanting to create LaTeX documents in a convenient fashion by first writing a Markdown file containing occasional LaTeX environments, then converting to LaTeX and feeding the resulting LaTeX into a pdflatex workflow. The extra newlines produced in this process affect the LaTeX parsing, leading to unwanted (and inconsistent) vertical space in the final document (see simple example below).
Is there a way to make Pandoc omit the newlines?
$ cat test.md
Testing environment
\begin{equation}
i^2=-1
\end{equation}
for whitespace.
$ pandoc -f markdown -t latex -o test.tex test.md
$ cat test.tex
Testing environment
\begin{equation}
i^2=-1
\end{equation}
for whitespace.
$ pandoc --version
pandoc 1.19.2.4
Compiled with pandoc-types 1.17.0.5, texmath 0.9.4.2, skylighting 0.1.1.5
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