Thanks for letting me know about org-entities. That is awesome. I now know
how to escape various characters in general, but unfortunately this does
not work within verbatim formatting (which makes sense).

Here's a minimum working example:

=====

* Escaping =equal= sign in verbatim formatting.
=a\equal{}b+c=
** Here's the same but using zero width spaces instead of /org entities/.
=a=b+c=

* Here I am trying to have double quotes in verbatim formatting.
=\quot{}This is inbetween double quotes\quot{}=.
** Here's the same but using zero width spaces instead of /org entities/.
=​"This is inbetween double quotes"​=.

* And here's to escapes asterisks
This is *bold*. But this is \ast{}not bold\ast{}.
This works!

=====

Here's what it looks like when exported:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10985/escape-chars.pdf

On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 9:48 PM Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
wrote:

> Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > My most common uses are escaping double quotes (") and equals (=)
> > within org verbatim blocks (=VERBATIM=)
> >
> > Examples:
> >
> > 1. =var=[ZWS]val=
> > 2. =[ZWS]"something"[ZWS]=
> >
> > Here [ZWS] is the 0x200b zero width space unicode char.
> >
> > I found [ZWS] useful as a generic escape char for org mode. There are
> > few other cases where this has been useful, but I can't recall right
> > now.
> >
> > In any case, what would be the recommended way to escape " and = in
> > the above 2 examples?
>
> Check out the variable `org-entities' for all the replaceable escape
> codes. It's got quotes and equal!
>
> E
>
>
>