escapingmarkdowndiacriticsmultimarkdown

How to handle special characters in markdown?

I am just discovering Markdown and MultiMarkdown and I am loving it so far. However, special characters are not properly escaped when exporting to HTML and come out as garbage in the browser.

Example:

How does Markdown handle special characters?
============================================

For example, German is full of ä, ö, ü and ß.

is converted to

<h1 id="howdoesmarkdownhandlespecialcharacters">How does Markdown handle special characters?</h1>

<p>For example, German is full of ä, ö, ü and ß.</p>

Since I have to write in German a lot, entering the escape sequences by hand is not an option. How can I get HTML output with properly escaped special characters?

Solution

  • As far as I know, this is not possible (though I would be happy to be proven wrong). I have recently been generating documentation in Doxygen using Markdown syntax and have had to replace all ° symbols with &deg;, which is a shame as it goes against the philosophy of Markdown, which is to make the text files as readable as the generated output.