LaTeX \linebreak new behavior

[Iacobus1983]

Since 3.6.4 LaTeX \linebreak is interpreted as LineBreak, and converted accordingly – i.e., is treated like \\. Yet, \linebreak suggests a line break within the justified text flow, and for this reason it's often used for mere fine-tuning of a specific pdf output. In such cases, the break is not relevant for conversion, since it does not bear any semantic / structural value. Indeed, conversion of such line breaks can be unwanted.

What were the reasons leading to implementing the new behavior? (Possibly, an option excluding this behavior would be useful, specially for backwards compatibility).

[jgm]

Commit 0d9fbc9
It doesn't give a rationale and I don't remember!
But yes, this should be reverted in the case of \linebreak.

[jgm]

I will revert it.

[alerque]

Besides plain \linebreak, this function can also take a numerical argument ranging from 0–4. While it's true that most cases are suggestions (week to strong) and Pandoc should probably just discard them as non semantic typesetting hints, the case of \linebreak[4] could be treated differently as a LineBreak in all circumstances since it is forced (or very close to it, the exceptions being when other functions can modify the behavior even outside of they lexical scope in the document, something Pandoc can't try to evaluate anyway).