What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. echo '\Doe2008' | pandoc -w plain

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

I'd expect 'Doe2008' but I see '2008'.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

pandoc 1.5.1 with citeproc and syntax highlighting on debian unstable.

Tried with pandoc 1.5.1.1 and its fixed there. Sorry about the noise.

I think you're mistaken in thinking it's "fixed" - 1.5.1.1 behaves the same. To see why it behaves that way, do % pandoc -t native \Doe2008 Pandoc (Meta {docTitle = [], docAuthors = [], docDate = []}) [ Para [TeX "\Doe",Str "2008"] ]

pandoc interprets a backslash followed by a string of letters as a raw LaTeX command. These aren't printed in HTML output, which is why you see the text disappear.

If you use '--strict' mode, you won't see this behavior.

So I don't think this is a bug -- it's a pandoc feature that it allows you to use raw LaTeX (perhaps a misguided feature, but now well established). And I think it makes sense to skip raw LaTeX in HTML output, though early versions of pandoc did not.

Does that seem reasonable?

Completely forgot about this feature, even so I use it all the time (so no its not misguided). I probably used -w markdown when I tried 1.5.1.1 instead of -w plain.