Posted by Andrew Carver on Dec 21, 2018; 8:55pm
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Zero-Width-Space-inserted-unexpectedly-tp6655.html

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is a feature or a bug; perhaps someone could clarify:

In the User Manual Sec. 37.4 (currently), "Replacements", it shows the replacement for '--' (M-dash shorthand) is

—

But what I've started getting is

—​

thus appending to the M-dash a Zero Width Space character. This has thrown a hiccup into one of my workflows, as this character shows up as strange random characters later on...

Is it just me, or is this a new behavior? The version of (Ruby) Asciidoctor I'm running is:

Asciidoctor 1.5.7.1 [https://asciidoctor.org]
Runtime Environment (ruby 2.5.1p57 (2018-03-29 revision 63029) [x64-mingw32]) (lc:UTF-8 fs:Windows-1252 in:UTF-8 ex:UTF-8)

Many thanks for any clarification on this!
Andy

P.S. This is using the HTML5 backend. I've not tested any others yet.