the docs for definition lists is not clear about the required indentation

[imz]

I read http://pandoc.org/README.html#definition-lists and didn't understand that the first letter of the definition must be at position 5, so that there are three spaces and a single : (or ~) somehow distributed in the first 4 position in the line.

I've just figured this out experimentally.

If this is an intended feature, I suggest to write about it in the documentation.

This won't work (unexpectedly!):

term 1
: definition

term 2
 : defintion

term 3
:  definition

[jgm]

I checked how PHP Markdown Extra does this, and in fact it doesn't require the indentation of the first line. So I'm going to just drop this requirement.