Native `zh` commands for AsciiDoc

[ronaldtse]

I've realized it is very tough to use original AsciiDoc commands to type in Chinese input. Most AsciiDoc commands require a switch of input language to English to type, for example (I've put in the corresponding symbol generated by the same keystroke in Simplified Chinese -- on a Mac!):

• underscore: _ （——）
• brackets/parens: < （《）, > （》）, [ （【）, ]（】）
• colon: :（：）
• backtick: "`" （·）
• dollar: $ （¥）
• period: . （。）
• backslash: \ （、）
• tilde: ~ （～）

These are the same:

• asterisk *
• hash #
• equal: =
• plus: +
• dash: -

Either this belongs to an AsciiDoc extension or for the imaginary text format.

Thoughts?

[opoudjis]

Well, yes, the meta language of ASCII doc is English, and the meta script of asciidoctor is Latin. A preprocessor could deal with these in a brute force fashion, by converting all Chinese punctuation into Latin, though the round-tripping may be non-trivial.

I will look into it, but I will treat this as an enhancement.

[ronaldtse]

Right, it should be an enhancement, but I'm not sure if it can be easily done by hacking asciidoctor or we should consider this in the imaginary format...

[ronaldtse]

A simplistic preprocessing approach may be inappropriate because there are legitimate uses of such punctuation within the text? Or the pre-processor needs to be intelligent enough to actually parse and replace the commands?

[opoudjis]

I think the latter; Asciidoc directives are reasonably constrained. Blindly doing it on all text would indeed be trouble.

[ronaldtse]

Probably a future thing. Unassigning.

[opoudjis]

Development abandoned on this gem