Subject: [Rfc-markdown] 1.3.15: control typographic_symbols

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 08:43:21 +0100

To deal with unnecessarily large RFC editor diffs, there is now a control for kramdown’s typographic symbols feature.

(It was always possible to control this via `kramdown_options`, but the new control has more unromantic defaults.)

In the YAML header, there is now a setting `typographic_symbols`.  For v2, this defaults to true (no change), for v3, this defaults to false, which is an abbreviation for

typographic_symbols:
  mdash: "---"
  ndash: "--"
  hellip: "..."
  laquo_space: "<< "
  raquo_space: " >>"
  laquo: "<<"
  raquo: ">>"

i.e., kramdown’s typographical symbols are translated to ASCII surrogates.

V3 users can still get proper typography by explicitly specifying:

typographic_symbols: true

(or a fleshed out version like the above), but current xml2rfc --v3 will then go ahead and destroy them.

If any of the members of the option are set, these defaults are no longer active, e.g.

typographic_symbols:
  mdash: "⸺"

will change the rendition of the markdown em-dash (`---`) to a two-em dash, but keep the other (beyond-ASCII) translations that kramdown defaults to in place.

TL;DR:
v3 users now get smaller diffs from the RFC editor; people who care about type (and don’t care about the sorry current state of typography in RFCXMLv3) have more direct access to the controls.

Grüße, Carsten