Escape meta characters of LaTeX in "judgeOffset" to avoid the compilation failure

[CLRafaelR]

I found that PDF compilation via LaTeX halts when judgeMax, the character/word used for the grammaticality/acceptability judgement whose number of characters are the largest in the ex environment, contains one of the LaTeX's meta-characters such as #, % or &. So, the following two markdown examples are not properly processed in the compilation procedure and throw an error: ! Illegal parameter number in definition of \@jwidth.

::: {.ex #grammaticality-judgement}
^# I'm not sure this is grammatical.
:::

or

::: {.ex #grammaticality-judgement}
a. ^# I'm not sure this is grammatical.
a. This is grammatical.
:::

I suspect that the line in texMakeGb4e function and the line in texMakeLangsci function render the characters like #, % or & to LaTeX as they are (i.e. without escaping them) and that this causes the above-mentioned error.

Those lines can be replaced with the following lua command (I verified this works in my environment):

local judgeOffset = "\\judgewidth{"..string.gsub(pandoc.utils.stringify(judgeMax), "([#$%&_{}~^])", "\\%1").."}"

Would you mind considering and verifying this patch?

Environment

pandoc-ling: the latest version as of 2021/02/24
pandoc: v2.11.4
OS: Windows 10 x64 (build 19042)

[cysouw]

Good catch! The error does not occur with linguex, so that might help until I have managed to fix this.

[cysouw]

I fixed it using your proposal, thx @CLRafaelR!

[CLRafaelR]

Yes, the problem occurred with (langsci-)gb4e and I had to mentioned that more implicitly... Thank you for the adaptation of the patch!

[cysouw]

I also added a new "lazy" example-coding possibility, in which you can make subentries (with letters) by just typing dashed (markdown lists). It will insert the letters anyway :-)