Thank you for your tool! We at JabRef are using your unicode2latex converter with great success.

I do have a question, as we recently had some related issues (JabRef/jabref#8673) and people were pondering if it were possible to find a better solution how to deal with LaTeX "special characters" like %, $, _, and so on.

I looked into it a little and found that the following symbols

  "#":                         "\\#",
  "$":                         "\\$",
  "%":                         "\\%",
  "&":                         "\\&",

can be found in the "raw" table located at:

• https://pastebin.com/Q4VkkNr1

but not in your code at:

• https://github.com/plurimath/unicode2latex/blob/master/lib/unicode2latex/unicode2latex.rb

I do know that these are special symbols in LaTeX. $ for example starts math-mode and % starts the comment environment.

For example, when users have a $ sign in their bibliographic entry, utilizing the unicod2latex cleanup action, JabRef behaves as if users wanted to start LaTeX math-mode (= leaving the $ as is), instead of converting the sign to \$, which would be rendered as dollar sign compiling in LaTeX.

I am curious, though, about your reasoning. Was including these special characters forgotten, or was it intentional?