Re: Some projects

[Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> That sounds interesting, though I don't really see much difference
> between this and plain simple comments.

  1. you cannot simply inline comments (you need to create a new link
     type or some such);
  2. you cannot mark exactly where the comment applies.

>> ** 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.
>>
>> There are some gotchas, however.
>
> And this one is probably the most interesting to me.  If I can help
> (testing, suggestions, maybe coding - I'm in the process of transferring
> copyright for my Emacs/Org-mode/AUCTeX contributions to the FSF), please
> let me know.

Here, I don't even have clear specifications. So the first step would be
to define them.

1. It should be unintrusive, i.e., you only need to escape ambiguous
   cases. E.g., \[1] makes sure that [1] will not be treated as
   a footnote reference, but \[*] is equivalent to [*].

2. It should allow to insert "=" within verbatim and "~" within code
   markup.

3. It should only be used in paragraphs, verse blocks or table cells.
   E.g., there is no escaping in #+NAME: ... or in node properties.

Assuming you can escape #, :, |, [, {, <, *, +, _, ^, /, ~, =, you only
need to escape \ if it is followed by any of the previous characters.

So, \\= means \= but \\! means \\!.

Unfortunately, there is a special entity, "\_ " which is incompatible
with the previous definition.

Implementation-wise, I think it is enough to resolve backslash escaping
when parsing a paragraph (or equivalent).


Regards,