Add way to define special \[characters]

[cloutiy]

Speaking of which, what is the escape character? I've been
assuming it's a backslash.

In a similar vein, I've been wondering about special characters,
like the copyright symbol. I'm not fond of |co| visually (personal
preference, therefore comment safely ignored), but I'm also thinking
that knowledgeable groffers will likely want to use groff notation for
special characters. What do you think of making the groff notation
standard throughout tml? [co] or [bu] for example. The parser's
going to have to pass those guys through anyway, so why have two
styles of entering special characters?

An advantage to using [...] is that when users want to wrap
formatting and text into a single entity, this is the style they'll
be using. In groff-speak

.char [TML] \f[B]\s[-1]TML\f[]\s[]

makes [TML] a valid entity, and you can see how useful that is.
Mind you, we'll have to come up with a way of creating this in tml.
Could be something as simple as

{special-character}
TML: <bold, size -1

which would get changed into .char ..., as above. Would also allow
grouping, which, given how extensively I use .char, would be a
blessing.

[cloutiy]

Actually the same could be achieved by defining user string:

{strings}
@TML = <bold, size -1<TML>

Then whenever @tml is encountered in the text it will be replaced with:

<bold, size -1<TML>

which gets resolved to:

\f[B]\s[-1]TML\f[]\s[]

[tml]

I am SOOO confused right now! ;)

[cloutiy]

haha sorry, didn't realize an @ symbol sends a message to someone. Sorry, not for you.