On 2015-10-25, at 16:45, Eric S Fraga <e.fr...@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Sunday, 25 Oct 2015 at 14:08, Nicolas Goaziou wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'd like to see some features moving forward, and some important issues
>> fixed, hopefully, in the next months. I'm sharing them here so that
>> anyone interested can help.
>
> Nicolas,
>
> I look forward to all the advances you have proposed... except for this one:
>
>> ** Backslash escaping
>>
>> Allowing to escape some symbols in plain text (e.g., emphasis markers,
>> square brackets...) would remove a limitation in verbatim/code objects.
>> As a small benefit, it would also permit to implement mid-word markup:
>> b*o*ld.
>
> I'm concerned that it will make typing normal text more onerous. Right
> now, org is quite non-intrusive in most of my writing yet is quite rich
> in what it can encode. Having to backslash symbols that I use in text
> quite often (especially square brackets) would be annoying. Maybe I
> misunderstood; if so, I apologise for the noise!
Eric, it's good that you write (IMO at least) - this is how the ideas
can get refined.
Since your point is quite valid - and OTOH, I would like to put anything
(or almost anything) in =code= markup, for instance (my use case: Emacs
keybindings, try =C-x ,= - Org won't recognize it as code!). I could
mess up with org-emphasis-regexp-components in e.g. file local
variables, but this is far from clean.
Maybe a good solution would be to allow two syntaxes for markup:
"short", like *bold* or =code=, and "long", like \textbf{bold} and
\verb|code|. If it is decided that such LaTeX-like syntax is fine, we
could only introduce escaping of backslash and curly braces, which seems
a decent compromise.
We could even use LaTeX-like constructs like \textbf, but with
\verb-like delimitation by two identical characters not present in the
text itself. We might also use a convention that if the character right
after \textbf is an opening paren of some kind - the syntax table might
be reused for that - then we expect a closing one at the end, and if
not, we expect an identical one at the end. This way, we could say
\textbf{Boldface} and \verb{verbatim}
but also
\textbf|{boldface in curly braces}| and \verb|C-x {|
etc. This way only the backslash needs escaping.
There are a lot of possibilities, and plenty of time to settle on the
best one.
> Thanks,
> eric
Best,
--
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University
