K K writes: > My use case is to emphasize chinese characters without spaces being inserted, even those zero-width spaces. For example "中文*测*试" should be enough to emphasize "测". > > I am using zero-width spaces right now, and it works fine in org-mode buffers, but if exported to latex-pdf files, the U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE character will not be zero-width for certain fonts. So I hope not to use that character. This is a bug. While escape symbols do not affect export in most common scenarios, your report is adding yet another case when zero-width space is actually altering the export result. I am attaching a tentative patch that will make Org export remove zero-width spaces when those spaces actually separate the object boundaries. Any objections? > On Tue, 26 Jul 2022 09:26:42 +0800, Ihor Radchenko wrote: >> Another idea we have discussed is using something similar to Markdown >> format: **bold**, //italics//, __underline__, etc. It is less verbose >> compared to the special blocks, which should be valuable for >> Japanese/Chinese/other languages with no spaces between words. > > By the way, it seems that my use case has already been implemented by markdown-mode. In a markdown-mode buffer "中文**测**试" will certainly make "测" bold. The idea was indeed inspired by Markdown. However, Markdown is different - **bold** is the official syntax to indicate bold markup. Though things are more complex in reality: https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/ Markdown has its own edge cases. Best, Ihor