Not sure of the relevance of issue 2956, which is about pandoc not 
recognising options in parentheses. There are no parentheses in the 
problematic header inclusion.

On Tuesday, 8 August 2017 03:56:00 UTC+9:30, John MacFarlane wrote:
>
> See https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/2956 
>
> Alternatively, in the dev version of pandoc you can tell 
> it you've got raw latex, not Markdown: 
>
> header-includes: 
> - `\let\oldsection\section`{=latex} 
>
> Final remark:  I don't understand why it's not parsing 
> the `\section` as raw tex.  I'll need to look into this; 
> it may be a bug in the LaTeX reader. 
>
> +++ David Nebauer [Aug 07 17 00:39 ]: 
> >   If I process this markdown file ('mwe-latex.md'): 
> >   --- 
> >   title: "Minimal Working Example" 
> >   header-includes: 
> >   - \let\oldsection\section 
> >   - \renewcommand{\section}[1]{\clearpage\oldsection{#1}} 
> >   --- 
> >   Text. 
> >   with the pandoc command: 
> >   pandoc -t latex --latex-engine=xelatex --output=mwe-latex.pdf 
> >   mwe-latex.md 
> >   I get the the error: 
> >   ! LaTeX Error: Missing \begin{document}. 
> >   See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation. 
> >   Type H <return> for immediate help. 
> >   ... 
> >   l.49 \let\oldsection\textbackslash{}s 
> >   pandoc: Error producing PDF 
> >   On generating latex output with the command: 
> >   pandoc -t latex --latex-engine=xelatex --standalone 
> >   --output=mwe-latex.tex mwe-latex.md 
> >   and examining line 49 of the output file it becomes apparent that this 
> >   line from the header inclusion: 
> >   \let\oldsection\section 
> >   has been munged by pandoc to: 
> >   \let\oldsection\textbackslash{}section 
> >   and this is causing the processing problem. (Note: changing latex 
> >   engines makes no difference.) 
> >   Once line 49 is edited to resemble the original command from the 
> header 
> >   inclusion the error disappears. 
> >   How can I prevent this latex command in the header inclusion from 
> being 
> >   munged by pandoc? 
> > 
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