[Docutils-users] Dash-transformation (was: rendering ellipsis_)

[Felix W. <Fel...@gm...>]

With the current implementations, some documents are specifically
written for the LaTeX writer (because they rely on the
dash-transformation) and some are written specifically for the HTML
writer (because they rely on multiple dashes not to be transformed).

Considering the commonness of both en-/em-dashes and unix-style options,
it is indeed probable that this writer dependence exists for many
documents.

Furthermore, in LaTeX there are probably frequent false-positives,
because the dash-transformation is applied unconditionally, and it isn't
even escapable.

So we have a problem which needs to be solved.

After re-reading David's posting, I too finally came to the conclusion
that an intelligent guessing-algorithm might be a bad idea.

A somewhat radical but nonetheless simple and effective solution might
be to deactivate the transformation in the LaTeX writer.

However, then it should be possible to easily enter en-/em-dashes with
ASCII characters.

* I'd suggest adding built-in substitution definitions for "|--|" to
  en-dash and "|---|" to em-dash.

* And it would be necessary to write em-dashes without spaces around.

The latter thing doesn't work, however:

$ quicktest.py 
foo|---|
<document source="<stdin>">
    <paragraph>
        foo|---|
$ quicktest.py 
foo|---|bar
<stdin>:1: (WARNING/2) Inline substitution_reference start-string without end-string.
<document source="<stdin>">
    <paragraph>
        foo|---
        <problematic id="id2" refid="id1">
            |
        bar
    <system_message backrefs="id2" id="id1" level="2" line="1" source="<stdin>" type="WARNING">
        <paragraph>
            Inline substitution_reference start-string without end-string.

IMO the trailing space should be made omittable.  (I think it won't
cause any existing documents to break, because this change would only
turn invalid constructs into valid ones.)

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