Ensuring non-italicization of a character

Question

I would like square brackets to never be italicized, even in a \textit environment. That is, I would like to type [ but have it always replaced with \textup{[}, and similarly for the right bracket. Apparently \newunicodechar doesn't work for the standard ASCII characters.

Is there some other way?

Will the square brackets only ever occur in text mode? Or will some of them occur in math mode? Please advise. — Mico, Jul 14 '18 at 19:24
It’d be pretty straightforward to support \textit{\bracket{foo} bar}, but are you looking to make [ and ] active characters and not have the other versions available at all? — Davislor, Jul 14 '18 at 19:37
Short answer: you can't, unless you're sure to avoid to use any optional argument to your commands. — egreg, Jul 14 '18 at 21:12
@Mico — yes, I would only use them in text mode. Does that help? — DavidLinguist, Jul 14 '18 at 22:29
@Davislor2 — I'd be fine making them active characters, and never having an italic square bracket. — DavidLinguist, Jul 14 '18 at 22:33
@egreg — Indeed, that's the problem I seem to face. I hoped there was a solution I had not discovered. — DavidLinguist, Jul 14 '18 at 22:33

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 14 '18 at 22:57

1

@Moewe's comment above led to the package https://ctan.org/pkg/embrac, which does exactly this. Thank you!

answered Jul 14 '18 at 22:57

DavidLinguist

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Ensuring non-italicization of a character

1 Answers1