Use underscores for emphasis in Markdown writer.

[joostkremers]

Currently, when converting a .docx to Markdown, bold italic text looks like this: ***Remark**: blah blah*, which IMHO is not very clear. Is there a way to use underscores instead, i.e., produce _**Remark**: blah blah_?

I tried figuring out if this can be done with a filter, but from what I managed to find out, it can't, because filters work on the AST, where the actual representation of elements such as Emphasis is not known.

[jgm]

The main reason is that underscores are more limited. (In many markdown dialects, intra-word underscores are not treated as emphasis.)

Anyway, yes, you can do it with a filter. It's not terribly hard. Here is one approach:

function Emph(el)
  if FORMAT == "markdown" then
    local underscore = pandoc.RawInline("markdown", "_")
    return ({underscore} .. el.content .. {underscore})
  end
end

function Strong(el)
  if FORMAT == "markdown" then
    local doubleunderscore = pandoc.RawInline("markdown", "__")
    return ({doubleunderscore} .. el.content .. {doubleunderscore})
  end
end

[jgm]

Oh, and if you want underscores for emph and asterisks for strong, just leave out the second function in that filter.