[DOXIA-542] Markdown module converts all apostrophes to quotation marks

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 1.4, 1.7
• Fix Version/s: 1.10
• Component/s: Module - Markdown
• Assignee: Michael Osipov
• Reporter: Wolfgang Illmeyer
• Created: 05/Jul/16 12:33
• Updated: 03/Jan/21 01:21
• Resolved: 03/Jan/21 01:21

Description

Whenever there is some text in a markdown file containing an apostrophe (U+0027, e.g. »don't«), it is seemingly unconditionally replaced by a »right single quotation mark« (U+2019).

The problem seems to be an out-of-whack »smart« feature of the underlying pegdown library, which is supposed to perform all kinds of typographic black magic. I'd suggest disabling that (or at least make it configurable), because apostrophes are not quotation marks and modern keyboard layouts have all the fancy typographic characters such as different length dashes, ellipses, and all sorts of quotation marks already easily available.

The fix is relatively trivial:

--- a/doxia-modules/doxia-module-markdown/src/main/java/org/apache/maven/doxia/module/markdown/MarkdownParser.java
+++ b/doxia-modules/doxia-module-markdown/src/main/java/org/apache/maven/doxia/module/markdown/MarkdownParser.java
@@ -70,7 +70,7 @@ public class MarkdownParser
      * The {@link PegDownProcessor} used to convert Pegdown documents to HTML.
      */
     protected static final PegDownProcessor PEGDOWN_PROCESSOR =
-        new PegDownProcessor( Extensions.ALL & ~Extensions.HARDWRAPS, Long.MAX_VALUE );
+        new PegDownProcessor( Extensions.ALL & ~Extensions.HARDWRAPS & ~Extensions.SMARTYPANTS, Long.MAX_VALUE );
 
     /**
      * Regex that identifies a multimarkdown-style metadata section at the start of the document

But this makes some tests fail and I didn't have the time to figure out how to fix them.
Also, the resulting apostrophes probably need to be escaped in the HTML.

I tested the patch with 1.7.

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #50