Org Entities (was: Add \EUR to `org-html-entities')

[Ulf Stegemann <ulf-news@zeitform.de>]

Hi Carsten,

Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have added your symbols.

thanks, works great.

I was wondering if there's a more general problem lurking behind this
(thus the change of subject): the problem of encoding entities in org
for various export formats, namely HTML, LaTeX, plain ASCII text (and
maybe plain unicode text).

As an example, let's assume we have an org file that should eventually
be available as HTML, PDF and plain text. Let's assume further, that for
whatever reasons (e.g. ugly double quotes in the needed font) the
document should use French quoting. Ideally
`\SomeMagicOrgEncoding{}Quote\AnotherMagicOrgEncoding{}' in the org file
would export to

  HTML       ->         &laquo;Quote&raquo;
  LaTeX      ->         \flqq{}Quote\frqq{}
  ASCII      ->         "Quote"
 (Unicode    ->         «Quote»)

Resorting to `org-html-entities' we could use

--8<--------------------------snip-------------------------->8---

#+LATEX_HEADER: \newcommand{\laquo}{\flqq} \newcommand{\raquo}{\frqq}

[...]

\laquo{}Quote\raquo{}

--8<--------------------------snap-------------------------->8---

to get the HTML and LaTeX output right but this leaves us with
`\laquo{}' in ASCII export and is generally a rather cumbersome
approach.

Maybe there's a simpler solution to address this but I haven't come
across it, yet (Note that `Use unicode!' isn't an option sometimes.).

Quoting is just one example that strikes my quite often, but the same
applies for all sorts of special characters; think of arrows, accented
characters etc.

This is certainly not a very pressing issue but it might be worth
thinking about how to handle this. What do you think?

Ulf