Make org-html export not escape special characters

Question

I'm writing an exporter for Remarkup: https://github.com/renatgalimov/org-phabricator.

It's similar to Markdown and based on org-md which itself is a modification of ox-html.

Whenever I export, some Unicode sequences get replaced by &something; HTML escape sequences, which is not necessary for remarkup.

I'm struggling to find, which function or setting I need to modify to skip the escaping.

Example:

   | ITEM                                | FOLLOW_CONFIG |
   |-------------------------------------+---------------|
   | \_  Enforcing particular resolution |               |
   | \_    No hotplug                    |               |
   | \_      HDMI mode auto              |               |

Result:

<table>

<tr>
<th>ITEM</th>
<th>FOLLOW<sub>CONFIG</sub></th>
</tr>


<tr>
<td>&ensp;&ensp;Enforcing particular resolution</td>
<td>&#xa0;</td>
</tr>


<tr>
<td>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;No hotplug</td>
<td>&#xa0;</td>
</tr>


<tr>
<td>&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;&ensp;HDMI mode auto</td>
<td>&#xa0;</td>
</tr>

</table>

I want to put   (en-space) instead of  s.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you don't need any entitites, then you can customize (i.e. include/exclude) the export of entities via the org-export-with-entities variable.

To set the variable per buffer, you can include the OPTIONS keyword with the value e:nil at the beginning of your file/buffer.

#+OPTIONS: e:nil

source: https://orgmode.org/manual/Export-Settings.html (and the variable its docstring)

To exclude the \_ entitites specifically, you can override their values with the org-entities-user variable, e.g. as follows:

(customize-set-value 'org-entities-user
                     (let (space-entities html-spaces (entity "_"))
                       (dolist (n (number-sequence 1 20) (nreverse space-entities))
                         (let ((spaces (make-string n ?\s)))
                             (push (list (setq entity (concat entity " "))
                                           (format "\\hspace*{%sem}" (* n .5))
                                           nil
                                           (setq html-spaces (concat " " html-spaces))
                                           spaces
                                           spaces
                                           (make-string n ?\x2002))
                                   space-entities)))))

(code taken from org-entities value and replaced &ensp by a single space)