With --number-offset set, --section-divs gets silently activated with no way to turn it off

[mrzool]

Noticed while converting from docx to html.

The following command:

pandoc document.docx -t html --number-sections --number-offset=1 --shift-heading-level-by=1

causes document sections to get wrapped in <section> tags, even if --section-divs was not explicitly given.

This doesn't happen when omitting -number-offset.

I couldn't find a way to change this behavior.

pandoc 2.14.2 on macOS 12.4.

See also: my original message on Google Groups

(y'all should really switch to groups.io btw)

[jgm]

Thanks for reporting.
Note that we also get incorrect number attributes on the sections:

<section id="one" data-number="1">
<h1 data-number="2"><span class="header-section-number">2</span>
one</h1>
</section>
<section id="two" data-number="2">
<h1 data-number="3"><span class="header-section-number">3</span>
two</h1>
</section>

That is the clue. See the HTML writer at line 852 -- in deciding whether to add the section tag, it checks to see if the surrounding Div and the Header have different attributes. Apparently they do in this case, because --number-offset modifies the attributes on the Header but not the surrounding Div. (See the function adjustNumbers.) We could fix this by having adjustNumbers modify the number on both the Header and the surrounding Div. Or we could avoid putting the number on the Div in the first place: this relates to a bigger issue, #5965.

[mrzool]

Wow, that was quick! Thanks @jgm.