Re: Avoid escaping braces in LaTeX export?

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> writes:

> Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:
> Org is not latex, for better or for worse.  However, it does allow you
> to mix the two in various ways.  The inline approach is limited to
> {text} that is on the same line.  You could try using visual-line-mode
> and have all paragraphs be single lines.
>
> Alternative, you could try (untested):
>
> blah blah blah
> #+LATEX: \ic{
> some text for the inline comment
> #+LATEX: }
> more blah

Thanks, Eric; that works, too.

I think for now the best thing is for me to put longer comments in a
custom environment.  Then I can use Org's block syntax, and have other
export backends do the right thing, if I ever use them instead of LaTeX.

I did dig into the exporter code a bit, so in case anyone is bitten by a
similar issue that doesn't have a ready workaround, the places to look
seem to be:
  - org-element.el:org-element-latex-or-entity-successor.  This is where
    LaTeX fragments are identified.  (As Eric notes, multi-line commands
    will not have their arguments parsed as part of a latex-fragment;
    instead, the argument and surrounding braces are parsed as text in
    the surrounding paragraph.) 
  - ox-latex.el:org-latex-plain-text.  This is where special characters
    that don't get parsed as part of a LaTeX fragment are
    protected/escaped.

I still think it might be nice if each of the protections in
org-latex-plain-text could be toggled via an #+OPTIONS keyword, since
more often than not, I find that characters are escaped in LaTeX export
when I would prefer they weren't.  But that might be a peculiar fact
about how I use Org.  Since for now I don't require this behavior, I'm
not going to try to implement it myself, but if anyone else would also
find it useful, let me know and I will take a stab at writing a patch.

Thanks, all, for the help!

-- 
Best,
Richard