Authors

Copyright 2006–2024 John MacFarlane (jgm@berkeley.edu). Released under the GPL, version 2 or greater. This software carries no warranty of any kind. (See COPYRIGHT for full copyright and warranty notices.) For a full list of contributors, see the file AUTHORS.md in the pandoc source code.

[1] The point of this rule is to ensure that normal paragraphs starting with people’s initials, like

B. Russell won a Nobel Prize (but not for "On Denoting").

do not get treated as list items.

This rule will not prevent

(C) 2007 Joe Smith

from being interpreted as a list item. In this case, a backslash escape can be used:

(C\) 2007 Joe Smith

[2] I have been influenced by the suggestions of David Wheeler.

[3] This scheme is due to Michel Fortin, who proposed it on the Markdown discussion list.

[4] To see why laziness is incompatible with relaxing the requirement of a blank line between items, consider the following example:

bar
:    definition
foo
:    definition

Is this a single list item with two definitions of “bar,” the first of which is lazily wrapped, or two list items? To remove the ambiguity we must either disallow lazy wrapping or require a blank line between list items.