List items starting with brackets broken in LaTeX output

[RyanKoppenhaver-NCC]

For the markdown input:

* \[foo\] bar

...kramdown generates this LaTeX output:

\begin{itemize}
\item [foo] bar
\end{itemize}

LaTeX then processes [foo] as an optional parameter to \item, specifying the bullet point symbol. (The intervening whitespace is ignored.) This results in output that looks like this:

 | Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
 |
 | * asdf
 foo bar
 | * blah

The issue also applies to ordered lists, and to input where the brackets are not escaped, but kramdown can't find a corresponding link definition, so it passes the brackets through. It's possible other LaTex output has similar issues, but I haven't looked in depth.

Based on some messing around, I think this can be fixed by inserting an empty group {} or a \relax command into the output after \item, or by transforming the leading [ into either {[} or \char91 . I kind of like the first option, but I'm by no means a TeX/LaTeX expert, so I'm not sure if another one might be more technically correct.

[gettalong]

There are already many places in kramdown's LaTeX converter that use {} because of the way LaTeX is parsed. So this is probably the way to go - I will have a look.

Thanks for reporting this bug!

[gettalong]

@RyanKoppenhaver-NCC I have looked at this and putting {} after \item would fix it for this case. However, during my experiments I found other problems with brackets and so they will additionally be escaped using {[} and {]}.

This is fixed in the next release.