Fix for "spacing issue with list in definition list" is confused if the list item starts with a Div

[ptoboley]

The code for "LaTeX writer: fix spacing issue with list in definition list." (a26ec96) gets confused / does the wrong thing if the first item in the BulletList is a Div. There might be other cases where it has a similar issue.

Here's a test case (test.md):

**Here is a dictionary item**

:   <div>

    Here is some text.

    Here is a bullet list:

    -   Item 1.
    -   Item 2.

    Here is another bullet list:

    -   Item 3.
    -   Item 4.

    </div>

When rendering the bullet lists inside the Div inserts an extra \item[] at the start of the bullet list, causing extra blank lines to be output.

Tested as:

pandoc -o test.tex test.md

Output (text.tex):

\begin{description}
\item[\textbf{Here is a dictionary item}]
Here is some text.

Here is a bullet list:

\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item[]
\item
  Item 1.
\item
  Item 2.
\end{itemize}

Here is another bullet list:

\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item[]
\item
  Item 3.
\item
  Item 4.
\end{itemize}
\end{description}

I believe this is caused by the code treating the whole Div as isFirstInDefinition meaning every bullet list inside the Div gets treated in that way. Possibly isFirstInDefinition should be cleared as soon as anything is output inside the definition, although perhaps other nested items (particularly another definition inside the definition?) could cause that approach to fail?

Expected output (output if the Div is removed):

\begin{description}
\item[\textbf{Here is a dictionary item}]
Here is some text.

Here is a bullet list:

\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
  Item 1.
\item
  Item 2.
\end{itemize}

Here is another bullet list:

\begin{itemize}
\tightlist
\item
  Item 3.
\item
  Item 4.
\end{itemize}
\end{description}

Wrapping the content in the Div is a peculiar behavior of our content generator. I can probably work around this by inserting some dummy item before the Div.

[jgm]

What would be a better fix for the original issue? Adding an empty list item seems like an ugly way to do it, anyway.

[ptoboley]

I don't know LaTeX well enough to suggest an alternative, sorry. I've not actually run into the original problem, only the fix.

Locally, I have set the following for description lists, which forces a break after each description anyway,

\setlist[description]{style=nextline}

However, I can't see making that a default would be acceptable (it would break a lot of documents here that don't use that setting, and create it in other ways, like inserting \hfill manually).

[jgm]

Hm, maybe inserting \hfill would be a good alternative to adding the empty \item[]?

[bpj]

Using\item[term]\hfill definition is the usual way to make the definition start on its own line without redefining \item.

[jgm]

I've used \hfill instead. But I think we may want to rethink this a bit.
Perhaps we should always use \hfill except when the body of the definition list is of the shape [Para _] or [Plain x].