A Suggestion for Strikethrough Syntax

[John MacFarlane]

+++ Bill Eccles [Nov 04 09 18:06 ]:

>    All,

> 

>    Hopefully, I'm not covering old territory, and a search of the list

>    archives seems to indicate that I'm not. If I am, then I extend my

>    apologies in advance.

> 

>    It converts

> 

>       -text to be struck through-

> 

>    to

> 

>       <strike>text to be struck through</strike>.

> 

>    Simple, and it works for me.


Pandoc uses this syntax in its markdown extensions:

~~text to be struck through~~

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#strikeout

One advantage of this over your proposal is that it doesn't require
a leading space, which is useful for edits and occasionally other
things (e.g. when you want to strike out the first word of a text):

apol~~l~~ogies
syntactic~~al~~
~~Dear Colleagues:~~To whom it may concern:

It also allows e.g. hyphenated words in struck-through
text:

~~permutation-invariant~~

Now that it's been in pandoc for a while, I'd be reluctant
to change this syntax, but it now strikes me that something
like the following would look better:

apol(~l~)ogies
syntactic(~al~)
(~permutation-invariant~)

John