Tom Gillespie writes: > I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but the edge cases for > the current markup syntax are already hard enough to > implement correctly, to the point where different parts of > Org mode are inconsistent. Intra-word markup isn't viable > because there simply isn't any sane way to parse something > like *hello world*/hrm/oh no*. The other issue is that this will > degrade parsing performance because almost every > character could precede the start of a markup section. > > I recommend anyone suggesting solutions try to implement > something that can parse the markup unambiguously with > lots of nasty test cases. You will likely find that it is impossible > to consistently tokenize markup, and that you have to hand > write a whole bunch of heuristics, making Org syntax even > harder to implement correctly. > > Any solution that suggests extending how =/*~+_ can be > used gets a hard no from me. I could see teaching other > exporters how to interpret \emph{hello}world, but trying for > to have any sane behavior for something like > why *hello*world oh no a wild askterisk* > is not worth it.
I believe, that emphasis marks are a part of Org that can be very shocking to new users. I mean, there is a series of behaviors that seem obvious and trivial in the emphasized text, but that in Org are not possible out of the box, unless you configure `org-emphasis-regexp-components'. Three quick examples. This in Org is not possible out of the box: #+begin_example [/emphasis/] ¡/emphasis/! ¿/Emphasis/? #+end_example Nor is it possible ---out of the box--- to extend emphasis beyond a certain number of lines. New users who come from other forms of markup maybe expect the obvious to be something like: some-text begin-emphasis whatever-is-in-between end-emphasis more-text Over time one ends up seeing these things more as a feature than as a bug :-) But those little inconsistencies make the Org syntax a bit ugly, IMHO. I can't think of how to improve that, though. Best regards, Juan Manuel