Ignore colon in words

[fhilgers]

Initial checklist

• I read the support docs
• I read the contributing guide
• I agree to follow the code of conduct
• I searched issues and couldn’t find anything (or linked relevant results below)

Problem

The german language has different forms of words depending on the gender (example: Mitglieder male, Mitgliederinnen female). One modern variant of writing those, which is required in some formal contexts, is Mitglieder:innen with a colon separating the suffix. Currently this leads to unwanted directives.

Solution

I could not find a test, which explictly tests for a textDirective directly following a word. The only ones I could find was a textDirective directly after an opening bracket, which is essentially the start of a span and not after a letter.

I cannot think of a usecase, where one would want to have a textDirective, directly attached to a word. Also there are already strict requirements for the leafDirectives and containerDirectives to be directly at the start of a line. Also, all directives have to directly follow the colons with no space.

What is the reason for allowing textDirectives directly attached to a word? If there is none, I would like to require that a textDirective is not allowed when attached to a word.

Alternatives

• A whitelist when handling directives which ignores the unwanted directives.
• Escaping all uses of colons inside words.

[ChristianMurphy]

Welcome @fhilgers! 👋
Pretty much all markdown inline constructs can happen mid word

---

example*example*
example**example**
example`example`

exampleexample
exampleexample
exampleexample

---

And any of these can be escaped by adding a backslash \.
I don't see a reason why this construct should be different from all the others.

[fhilgers]

Woops, that makes sense. In my mind the directive syntax felt so much like a function call from general programming languages that I found that behaviour weird. But you're definetly right!