[Q] How to italicize without introducing a space?

[Ruijie Yu]

Hello,

I am working on a piece of CJK text, which requires italicization.

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
任何一个章节可以通过增加例如 =TODO= 或者 =HOLD= 等关键词来被设置成 /待办/ 。
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Note the spaces before and after the pair of `?/'.  Without these
spaces, the HTML export does not show "待办" as italicized, but instead
treat them as inline literal `?/' characters, which is expected in
current Org implementation.

Also note that -- unlike English -- Chinese sentences rarely use spaces
(if at all), so showing the space simply because the Org grammar needs
it seems unnatural.

However, I don't immediately see how to resolve the issue natively in
Org.  If we allow `?/' to italicize regardless of spaces, then things
like Unix paths would no longer work.

So, I came up with using LaTeX like this:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
任何一个章节可以通过增加例如 =TODO= 或者 =HOLD= 等关键词来被设置成\(\textit{待办}\)。
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

This has two drawbacks:
1. (network-related?) Delay.  Apparently HTML uses MathJax to render
LaTeX, and my browser experiences a 1-second delay due to it needing to
download JS code from MathJax and doing some processing.
2. Transferability.  This only resolves the issue of /italicization/.
What if I need to underscore or bold a piece of text (likely), or to add
an inline code block with CJK characters (unlikely)?  I would have to
search for how to do each in LaTeX and write the workaround accordingly,
instead of simply using the Org markup syntax for each of them.

Are there any other solutions than what I have currently?

-- 
Best,


RY