Apostrophe in Headings Escaped as [cq] in PDF Table of Contents

[matttproud]

Explain the problem.

In the generated table of contents for PDF documents using the pdfroff engine, an apostrophe (') is rendered as the ROFF escaping of [cq]. To reproduce:

$ cat defect.md
# Introduction
This is an introduction.

## The City's Context in My Life

It was very important.

$ pandoc --pdf-engine pdfroff defect.md -o defect.pdf

This is rendered as such in evince:

Pandoc version?

$ pandoc -v
pandoc 2.9.2.1
Compiled with pandoc-types 1.20, texmath 0.12.0.2, skylighting 0.8.5
Default user data directory: /home/mtp/.local/share/pandoc or /home/mtp/.pandoc
Copyright (C) 2006-2020 John MacFarlane
Web:  https://pandoc.org
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is no warranty, not even for merchantability or fitness
for a particular purpose.

Debian 11.1.

[jgm]

Confirmed with latest pandoc.

[jgm]

The ms writer produces:

.SH 2
The City\[cq]s Context in My Life
.pdfhref O 2 "The City\[cq]s Context in My Life"
.pdfhref M "the-citys-context-in-my-life"

The second line .pdfhref O should be changed so that no roff syntax (such as [cq]) is used.