shift-heading-level-by vs reference-section-title

[p3palazzo]

It seems the shift-heading-level-by is not applied to the reference section title when the latter has been generated from metadata. Is this the expected behavior? I think it would make sense if the references title were subjected to the same heading level shift as the other headings.

[jgm]

That's right. --shift-heading-level-by is implemented as a "transform" in https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/blob/main/src/Text/Pandoc/App.hs#L296-L309.
(The other "transforms" are handlers for east_asian_line_breaks and ipynb output.) Currently the transforms are applied right before filters (and thus before citeproc). I think it probably makes sense to move the transforms after the filters. @tarleb can you think of anything this would break?

[tarleb]

There might be some filters that would break, but that's about it. No objections to the change from my side.