Re: A simple Lua filter for Pandoc

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Max Nikulin writes:

> Ideally it should be done pandoc and only if it causes incorrect
> parsing of org markup. NBSP, probably, should be replaced by some
> exporters, I do not think, it is a problem e.g. in HTML files.

The reason for this filter is my own comfort. Linguistics texts contains
a lot of certain characters such as "/" or "*", and they are often
italicized or bold. So, in order not to be more confused than necessary,
I prefer that they pass as entities. In general, there are certain
characters that I am more comfortable working with as entities than as
literal characters (for example, a lot of zero-width combining
diacritics that are used a lot in linguistics or epigraphy (and there
are no fonts that include the NFC normalized version of all possible
combinations: in fact, they are not in Unicode, and would have to go to
the private use area). Summarizing, I prefer that these characters have
their actual typographic representation only with LuaTeX. A very typical
example is the character U+0323 (COMBINING DOT BELOW). It is very
uncomfortable to work /in situ/, although there are fonts that usually
render it well (with the 'mark' otf tag).

(Naturally, I have to do, inside Org, a lot of corrections in italics
later, due to the bad habit that Word users have of applying direct
formatting. Interestingly only the pandoc docx reader trims the emphasis
before exporting to Org or Markdown, so as not to produce things like
"/ foo /". But the odt reader doesn't. I don't know if I'm missing
something.