Marking a region for highlighting in Hugo posts

You’ll notice that I highlight short phrases in many of my daily post entries here. I think this makes it easier to scan things later. The HTML markup for this is just a styled <mark> tag wrapping the text to be highlighted.

I write my posts in Org-mode and convert them to Hugo-compatible Markdown using ox-hugo. The path from Org-mode to HTML for this is a little convoluted, so I cheat and use a macro to generate the markup.

At the top of my blog.org file, I have defined the following macro:

#+macro: mark @@html:<mark>$1</mark>@@

And when writing posts in Org-mode, I surround the text I want to be highlighted with the macro, like this:

I would like to {{{mark(higlight this text)}}} in the rendered HTML, please

This replaces the text passed to the macro with properly-escaped markup for export. While it’s easy enough to type the macro manually, I’ve created a small elisp function to do it for me:

    (defun jab/markregion ()
      "Add a 'mark' macro to the current region (for Hugo)"
      (interactive)
      (if (region-active-p)
          (progn
            (goto-char (region-end))
            (insert ")}}}")
            (goto-char (region-beginning))
            (insert "{{{mark("))))

Now, I can simply highlight some text and call the jab/markregion function and I’m done.

It’s easier and faster than it sounds, really.