Re: [Q] How to italicize without introducing a space?

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2023-03-29, at 05:12, Ruijie Yu via General discussions about Org-mode. <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am working on a piece of CJK text, which requires italicization.
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> 任何一个章节可以通过增加例如 =TODO= 或者 =HOLD= 等关键词来被设置成 /待办/ 。
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> Note the spaces before and after the pair of `?/'.  Without these
> spaces, the HTML export does not show "待办" as italicized, but instead
> treat them as inline literal `?/' characters, which is expected in
> current Org implementation.
>
> Also note that -- unlike English -- Chinese sentences rarely use spaces
> (if at all), so showing the space simply because the Org grammar needs
> it seems unnatural.
>
> However, I don't immediately see how to resolve the issue natively in
> Org.  If we allow `?/' to italicize regardless of spaces, then things
> like Unix paths would no longer work.
>
> So, I came up with using LaTeX like this:
>
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> 任何一个章节可以通过增加例如 =TODO= 或者 =HOLD= 等关键词来被设置成\(\textit{待办}\)。
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
>
> This has two drawbacks:
> 1. (network-related?) Delay.  Apparently HTML uses MathJax to render
> LaTeX, and my browser experiences a 1-second delay due to it needing to
> download JS code from MathJax and doing some processing.
> 2. Transferability.  This only resolves the issue of /italicization/.
> What if I need to underscore or bold a piece of text (likely), or to add
> an inline code block with CJK characters (unlikely)?  I would have to
> search for how to do each in LaTeX and write the workaround accordingly,
> instead of simply using the Org markup syntax for each of them.
>
> Are there any other solutions than what I have currently?

My go-to solution (and not only mine, I guess) is to use a zero-width
space.  I even have a command to do this:

(defun insert-zero-width-space ()
  "Insert Unicode character \"zero-width space\"."
  (interactive)
  (insert 8203))

Hth,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl