~, *, +, 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
*foo*
foo
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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