I get an error when running md to pdf as follows (using Pandoc 2.8 a nightly build from 12-Oct-2019):

Error producing PDF.
! Package inputenc Error: Unicode character ∗ (U+2217)
(inputenc) not set up for use with LaTeX.

See the inputenc package documentation for explanation.
Type H <return> for immediate help.
...

l.481 ∗

Try running pandoc with --pdf-engine=xelatex.

When I runt the test code you provide above, I get:

0000000 e2 88 97 20 e2 88 97 20 e2 88 97 0a
0000014

I can't do the suggested using xelatex because then my images don't show up in pdf (but they do without xelatex).

Note, when using xelatex, I do see the &lowast;, but it is not centered, hence the need for latex markup for centering (unless there is a different way to do this).

Sincerely,

Jeff Mcneill

On Wednesday, October 23, 2019 at 1:30:10 PM UTC+7, Václav Haisman wrote:

On 23. 10. 19 6:30, Jeff Mcneill wrote:

In markdown, I markup a dinkus as such:

<p class="dinkus">&lowast; &lowast; &lowast;</p>

What version of Pandoc are you using? If I test with echo '<p class="dinkus">&lowast; &lowast; &lowast;</p>' | pandoc -f html -t latex | od -t x1 I can see the UTF-8 characters U+2217 make it through into the LaTeX output.