What were you doing: Imported a file that contained the following sentence: “An example is iA Writer, a text editor that instantly translates the “#-sign” into a level one heading…”
What feature did you use: Imported this from the Finder, so was a markdown file.
What happened: Bear recognized the quoted term as a tag called -sign. To get rid of the tag, I had to go in the quote and remove the space Bear had added in front of the “-sign”. Then it no longer saw it as a tag.
What did you expect to happen: What I write within quotation marks should not be recognized as tags, even if a word in such a quote has the pound symbol.
To my knowledge, with 30 years behind me writing as a journalist, there are only two types that you use to quote someone or to use as a “shortened” form of definition as the one I just used and it’s that one that is causing trouble.
Others you might be referring to are the straight quotes as used to denote seconds or inches, but as I have “use smart quotes and dashes” turned on in the System Preferences, I’m definitely referring to those.
I assume your native language is English then. E.g., I’m Polish and our default quotations look „like this”. And if you copy from articles or the web, you might come across «this», and others – depending on language and convention. And even in English, you have single quotes and double quotes, and again, as you mentioned yourself, “straight” or typographical.
I second the opinion that solving this is non trivial. French quotation marks look like this « » and I would add that there’s no clear call as to say whether something quoted should be a tag or not. Some people might want that on the contrary.
I think the more sensible solution would be to provide a way to escape the # sign (and Markdown code in general) such as with \. That way everybody can tailor the app to their needs.
I didn’t realise we could escape # symbols! That’s cool. It did lead me to do some experimenting and found the following super minor bug.
Basically if you have a line of backslash escape characters then you more your cursor through them using the arrow keys, the parser / syntax highlighter gets confused as to which one should be interpreted as the text and which the escaped character. I’ve added a small screen recording to demonstrate.
and it’s that one that is causing trouble.