Re: Org mode escape characters

[Ihor Radchenko]

David Boss <dave.boss@yahoo.com> writes:

>  You tell me to "surround" slashes by zero-width-space characters, to keep 
> them from being taken as italic escapes.OK. First problem: what, exactly, is 
> the zero-width space character? I won't be entering text with my fingers, a 
> lispfunction I wrote will be inserting the characters I need. So, exactly 
> what 8-bit value is a zero-width-escape? 00000000?The example in 17.12 seems 
> to put the zero-escape after the control character it's supposed to affect, 
> but then theeffect of it balances forward. 12.6 tells me I also have to put a 
> comma before any line beginning with a star, despitethe fact that my only 
> purpose was to deal with italics. I need to write a function which works, 
> first time, every time;I can't keep playing around with each piece of text it 
> applies to, until it works on that one. OK, helping me get afunction written 
> is not your job, but I shouldn't need .odt and/or pandoc; I should not have 
> needed your help,at all: plain vanilla copy/paste in emacs should bring along 
> text properties within the scope of the copied text.
> Still, I do appreciate your help.

Org does not perform any kind of format conversion when you kill
selection by default.

There is however a third-party package that provides some (limited?)
support for clipboard conversion: https://github.com/jkitchin/ox-clip

Note that Org is a markup format with all the relevant advantages and
disadvantages. The requirement to escape some special symbols is
one of the disadvantages.

You can insert zero-width space using C-x 8 <RET> or by its hex number
or directly copying it to (insert "​").

Note that Org does provide the means to convert Org markup into
alternative markups like HTML. This is done using export functionality:
https://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html#Exporting

Hope it helps.

Best,
Ihor