We might need some more explaination about this function. Is this because linguists put & in their utterances, and then when its in the laTeX it breaks the code, but what if the user actually puts LaTeX code in one of their fields (ie, i want to put my QTree code into a field called QTree... so that i can create handouts and keep the trees with the data? I think in this case, the escapeLatexChars is not wanted?

we can probably detect if the user wants the things escaped or not.. depending on how much of latex chars are in there already.