Markdown syntax not working within \multicol environment

Question

For extending footnotes over two columns, https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/462347/how-to-force-a-footnote-to-extend-over-both-columns-in-a-twocolumn-article?noredirect=1&lq=1 recommends \usepackage{multicol} instead of the twocolumn document option.

Although this works for pure LaTeX documents, it will not work for generating PDF output by RMarkdown and pandoc when having Markdown-formatted elements within the multicol environment as in:

---
title: Sample Document
header-includes: \usepackage{multicol}
output: pdf_document
---

\begin{multicols}{2}
# First section
\end{multicols}

What could be a possibility to achieve footnotes extending over two columns when using RMarkdown?

Answer 1

Surround the \begin and \end commands with blank lines. If that doesn't work, then mark them as LaTeX snippets like so:

```{=latex}
\begin{multicols}{2}
```

# First section

```{=latex}
\end{multicols}
```