You must choose your escape character wisely. You might already know that your escape character cannot occur in the data or in the strings in the titles, dates, text=, and so forth. You must also be careful not to clash with the split character.

If you use an escape character at the start of a table header, you must also specify SPLIT=. This is because in column headers, if you haven't defined a split character, then the first character of the string is examined; if it is a nonname character (not alphanumeric or underscore), then it is stripped off and used as the split character.

The split is processed very early, before the escape character. This is a particular problem when the procedure uses the name or label as the column header, such as in the DATA step interface. It's also a problem in the REPORT procedure, where the slash (/) is the default SPLIT= value.

In the following example, SPLIT= is specified in the header definition:

  proc template;
    delete FooBar;
    define table FooBar;
      style=[borderwidth=0 cellpadding=0];
      column Column_One;
    define column Column_One;
    define header x;
      style=[background=white font_size=12pt ];
    end;
    header=x;
    split='!';  /* specify split character */
    end;
    end;
  run;

  ods listing close;
  ods pdf file='C:\temp\ods.pdf';
  ods escapechar = '\';

  data _null_;
    file print ods=(template='FooBar');
    length Column_One $100;
    /* escape character at start of table header */
    label Column_One = "\nColumn_One Header\1.5n" ;
    Column_One = 'Line 1';
    put _ods_;
  run;
  ods pdf close;

Usage of ESCAPECHAR= is briefly summarized in a topic about inline formatting in the Base Community.

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