Avoid escaping braces in LaTeX export?

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

Hi all,

I'm wondering if there is a way to prevent the LaTeX exporter from
escaping "{" and "}" characters.  There are export options to control
the behavior of a number of other special characters, but I don't see
any way to control export of braces in the documentation.  Am I just
missing it?  If not, I'd like to request this as a feature.

Here's my use case.  I often create new commands in LaTeX to abstract
over some common pattern so I can easily type it and change it later if
necessary.  For example, when taking notes on readings, I have a command
that makes its argument into an `inline comment' (basically an aside to
myself) defined as follows:

#+LATEX_HEADER: \newcommand{\ic}[1]{{\footnotesize [~#1~]}}

Then in my notes I have things like:

 Marcus' point is more subtle, though, than that the substitutional
 reading validates these inferences or theorems while the objectual
 reading does not.  \ic{This would not persuade Quine, for example: the
 failure of existential generalization in modal contexts is for Quine a
 reason to reject quantified modal logic, rather than give the
 existential quantifier a different reading.}  

The new exporter exports this as:

 Marcus' point is more subtle, though, than that the substitutional
 reading validates these inferences or theorems while the objectual
 reading does not.  \ic\{This would not persuade Quine, for example: the
 failure of existential generalization in modal contexts is for Quine a
 reason to reject quantified modal logic, rather than give the
 existential quantifier a different reading.\} 

with the braces wrapping the argument for my custom command escaped.
This breaks the custom command in the export.

I can't test it at the moment, but I believe the old exporter did not
escape these braces, as I used this command regularly and it compiled
correctly.

I would like to be able to get the old behavior back.  I don't mind
manually escaping braces when necessary, because I almost always do not
want them escaped.  I understand if this is not a reasonable default,
but it would be nice for me if it were something I could set on an
#+OPTIONS line.  If others are interested in this, I can look into
creating a patch.

(By the way, it looks like there was a patch for a similar issue in
commit c6fd49726f2eaf417361b190b37e2d8ffb5864fc, but that is from April
2009 and therefore would apply to the old exporter.)

Thanks for your insights!

-- 
Best,
Richard