Dear org-mode developers, I am desperately trying to get a square bracket into the description of a link. That is, in an org file that I want to export to HTML, I would like to have the source <a href="http://example.org">foo [bar]</a> and of course I would like to avoid using XML character entities such as b; for [, for two reasons: 1. It is painful. 2. I might eventually want to export my org file to some other format than HTML. I noticed this post on escaping in org links (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/37888), but apparently I didn't understand it. I thought that escaping as %5B might work – not only in the "link" component of a link, where it works due to the specification of URIs, but also in the "description" component, but in the description it doesn't work. Quite generally, I wonder whether there is (or, why there is not) a generic escape character (e.g. the backslash), which would also allow for escaping other characters of the org markup syntax, such as * or /. So far this was something like a feature request, but there is also one actual bug: When I insert or edit a link with org-insert-link (C-c C-l) and insert square brackets into the link description, they are rewritten to {...}, which I do not consider acceptable. If there is any escape syntax, they should rather be rewritten using that escape syntax. Thanks in advance for any pointers, Christoph -- Christoph Lange, http://www.facebook.com/ch.lange, Skype duke4701
Dear org-mode developers, I am desperately trying to get a square bracket into the description of a link. That is, in an org file that I want to export to HTML, I would like to have the source <a href="http://example.org">foo [bar]</a> and of course I would like to avoid using XML character entities such as b; for [, for two reasons: 1. It is painful. 2. I might eventually want to export my org file to some other format than HTML. I noticed this post on escaping in org links (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/37888), but apparently I didn't understand it. I thought that escaping as %5B might work – not only in the "link" component of a link, where it works due to the specification of URIs, but also in the "description" component, but in the description it doesn't work. Quite generally, I wonder whether there is (or, why there is not) a generic escape character (e.g. the backslash), which would also allow for escaping other characters of the org markup syntax, such as * or /. So far this was something like a feature request, but there is also one actual bug: When I insert or edit a link with org-insert-link (C-c C-l) and insert square brackets into the link description, they are rewritten to {...}, which I do not consider acceptable. If there is any escape syntax, they should rather be rewritten using that escape syntax. Thanks in advance for any pointers, Christoph -- Christoph Lange, http://www.facebook.com/ch.lange, Skype duke4701
Hi, One way to solve it would be with org entities. I don't think they exist for square brackets, but you could make a user-defined one. You could put something like this in your .emacs (I think plain bracket characters should work in every export format, so I haven't bothered to look up HTML entities or LaTeX commands): (setq org-entities-user '(("lbr" "[" nil "[" "[" "[" "[") ; left square bracket ("rbr" "]" nil "]" "]" "]" "]"))) ; right square bracket Then try the following -- ugly as sin, and as painful as XML entities, but it gives the output you want in whatever format: Here is a [[http://foobar.org][foo \lbr{}bar\rbr{}]] The curly bracket replacement (which I think is very reasonable, really) is currently hardcoded in org-make-link-string. If it were made customizable, that would take the pain (but not the ugliness) out of making links like the above. A backslash escape would have been nice to have, but \[...\] is already interpreted as a math environment. Yours, Christian On 1/31/12 5:19 PM, Christoph LANGE wrote: > Dear org-mode developers, > > I am desperately trying to get a square bracket into the description > of a link. > > That is, in an org file that I want to export to HTML, I would like to > have the source > > <a href="http://example.org">foo [bar]</a> > > and of course I would like to avoid using XML character entities such > as b; for [, for two reasons: > > 1. It is painful. > 2. I might eventually want to export my org file to some other format > than HTML. > > I noticed this post on escaping in org links > (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/37888), but apparently I > didn't understand it. > > I thought that escaping as %5B might work – not only in the "link" > component of a link, where it works due to the specification of URIs, > but also in the "description" component, but in the description it > doesn't work. > > Quite generally, I wonder whether there is (or, why there is not) a > generic escape character (e.g. the backslash), which would also allow > for escaping other characters of the org markup syntax, such as * or /. > > So far this was something like a feature request, but there is also > one actual bug: > > When I insert or edit a link with org-insert-link (C-c C-l) and insert > square brackets into the link description, they are rewritten to > {...}, which I do not consider acceptable. If there is any escape > syntax, they should rather be rewritten using that escape syntax. > > Thanks in advance for any pointers, > > Christoph >