On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 09:55:49AM -0800, Steven Koenig wrote:
> > +(so-called because it's derived from a shell written by Stephen Bourne&mdash;this

I haven't looked at the patches directly (just following the
comments), but for Markdown in order of decreasing preference:

1. UTF-8 characters (U+2014 EM DASH).
2. ASCII equivalent (---), ideally with some SmartyPants [1] rendering
   downstream to convert to HTML entities for webpage output.
3. Source HTML entities (&mdash;).

I'm not sure about declaring encodings for Markdown source if we can't
rely on UTF-8 $LANGs everywhere, but including HTML entities directly
just sounds like a way to confuse students reading the source
directly.  If we must use HTML entities in the source (for some reason
I don't understand), we should have a way to convert them to UTF-8 or
ASCII equivalents before we pass these notes out to students.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/