Hi Ihor, Thank you for looping me in. Best, Tom The way I have implemented this is by maintaining an explicit list of characters that are safe for pre markup and another for post markup.
It is not possible to use unicode punctuation for this because there are a variety of punctuation marks that cannot appear in that position and be considered markup, those include @, #, % to name just a few. Therefore, if we want to do this we commit to extending and then maintaining the lists of valid pre and post markup delimiters as special cases. Note also this could produce changes from current behavior because things that previously tokenized as a series of words connected by e.g. underscores could become markup. The alternative would be (as usual in these cases) for the user to add a zero width space or something like that between the end of the markup marker and the symbol they want to follow the markup. This solution is (trivially) backward compatible, and works for all chars regardless of whether org-mode has blessed them as sanctioned marks. My inclination would be not to make this change because there are a potentially infinite number of future "left right neutral" marks that we would have to maintain and would occasionally have to field requests from users to add them, and those solutions would not work with older versions of org.
