I try to convert from Markdown to HTML using a custom template. I copied my custom default.html5 to the user data directory, ~/.local/share/pandoc, and executed pandoc -s input.md -o output.htm.

My custom default.html5 is simply a copy of the https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jgm/pandoc-templates/master/default.html5 with the <title> element deleted.

<!-- this line is deleted -->
<title>$if(title-prefix)$$title-prefix$ – $endif$$pagetitle$</title>

When I execute pandoc -s input.md -o output.htm, Pandoc seems to ignore that custom default.html5, because when I examine the resulting HTML files, the <title> element is still exist. What I’m doing wrong?

pandoc 3.1.13