Joost Kremers <joostkrem...@fastmail.fm> writes:
> On Fri, Apr 02 2021, Tim Cross wrote: >> Getting backticks to font-lock correctly is relatively easy. Getting the >> exporters to understand the new syntax is more of a challenge > > Don't the exporters work off of some intermediate representation, like Pandoc > does? I kinda thought that was what `org-element.el` was all about... > > And of course I meant to type ~org-element.el~ there... :D Yes, at least most of the core ones should. However, I would still expect some surprises and of course there are no guarantees regarding the contrib and other external ones. Despite attempts to abstract the syntax to make it 'flexible', I would be surprised if there is not functionality in some of the exporters which has implicit assumptions regarding the syntax being used and is not isolated from such changes. Note that I'm not saying this cannot be done or even that is should not be done. I just want to highlight that just making changes to how org deals with it at the 'presentation' layer may not be sufficient and that you would have to verify there are no unexpected side effects in any of the exporters. If you wanted to keep backwards compatibility or make using ` and alternative to ~, you would also need to decide/verify things like `word~ (i.e. mixed delimiters) are handled correctly (i.e. simple regex with alternatives would not be sufficient - would need to be a match which allowed both but ensured matching values). Of course, there is a big difference between making a change to org and making a change to an individual's own org instance. So if we are talking about how someone can hack their own org instance to use ` instead of ~, it can be much simpler as they don't have to worry about the bits they don't use or backwards compatibility. The downside then becomes just the hassle of maintaining your hacks over subsequent org releases. One reason why I would probbly go with a method which just changes how I input data. For example, I would define a function which inserts ~ or if a region is marked, surrounds it in ~ and then just bind that to a key, never using ~ or ` directly to mark text. -- Tim Cross
