Not sure how I missed that.  I've left a comment.  I still think escaping with passthrough only when special characters are encountered is the best solution, but will add to the discussion.  I'm locally using a patch now so I have a workaround for me that I'm happy to share if issue 2337 makes any progress.

On Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 10:07:27 AM UTC-7 John MacFarlane wrote:

Have you seen https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/2337

The escaping "rules" seem a complete mess on asciidoc's side,
unless things have been improved since I investigated.

The "passthrough" method seems like too big a hammer.
You avoid the escape problems but you'll get very
ugly asciidoc.

Anyway, it might make sense to comment on that issue.

Jason Miller <jasn...@gmail.com> writes:

> ~, *, +, and _ must be escaped in some cases for asciidoc (and all cases
> when doubled). The rules for when they must be escaped is fairly confusing
> and backslash-escaping is disallowed when either the escaping is
> non-mandatory or the characters are doubled.
>
> I'm willing to submit a patch, but wanted some thoughts on the approach
> first
>
> Simple test-case that shows the issue:
>
> ---
> pandoc -f html -t asciidoctor /dev/stdin <<EOF
> <p>*foo*</p>
> <p><b>foo</b></p>
> EOF
> ---
>
> Will yield identical asciidoc (with strong tag) for both paragraphs and
> results in bolded text for both cases.
>
> I have found two ways to escape that work in both asciidoc and asciidoctor
> (with examples using an asterisk):
>
> 1. Define an attribute for each character that needs to be escaped, and use
> that; the definitions can go anywhere in the document before being used,
> with the header being typical:
>
> ---
> :star: *
>
> {star}
> ---
>
> 2. Use a passthrough:
>
> ---
> pass:specialcharacters[*]
> ---
>
> #2 lets you escape any arbitrary strings, so escapeString could just render
> any string with special characters as:
>
> pass:specialcharacters[this is some text that has * special + characters]
>
> I'm leaning towards implementing #2 as it's easier to implement and #1
> requires rendering the header correctly. #1 probably is closer to how I
> would hand-write these escapes though.
>
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