Use Section Sign ( § ) as XRref Section Signifier

[tajmone]

To keep cross references brief in the text, it would be nice to use the § section sign instead of the current "Sec." signifier, in order to output xrefs like:

See §5.3, "Customing Text" for more details.

Unfortunately this is currently unachievable due to space insertion after the section-refsig string attribute, and there's no way to inform Asciidoctor that the user-defined section-refsig shouldn't be followed by a space. Therefore, attempting this:

:section-refsig: §

actually produces:

See § 5.3, "Customing Text" for more details.

where the unwanted space between the § and the section number is both incorrect and hugly.

But this should soon become possible, if either my feature request (asciidoctor/asciidoctor#3498) is accepted, or when the upcoming features proposed in asciidoctor/asciidoctor#2212 are implemented.

So we only have to wait and keep an eye open on when this becomes possible in future Asciidoctor releases.

References

• Wikipedia » Section sign
• Asciidoctor Manual » §27.5. Customizing the Cross Reference Text
• Allow Custom :section-refsig: without Trailing Space asciidoctor/asciidoctor#3498 — Allow Custom :section-refsig: without Trailing Space
• Add support for a custom formatting string in the xrefstyle attribute asciidoctor/asciidoctor#2212 — Add support for a custom formatting string in the xrefstyle attribute