Prevent HTML escaping when rendering a pdf

[kalsan]

When rendering a .pdf.erb file to latex and the file contains non-html-safe parts, they get escaped in a way that would be suitable for HTML. However, we are generating LaTeX and not HTML, which means html_safe makes no sense in the first place (already the name says that).

This is a problem in the following example:

<%= people.map{|person| "'#{person.label}'"}.join(', ') %> 

Since the string produced by join is not html_safe, the generated String is "Anna", "Berta", which then causes LaTeX to crash because the & sign is not permitted.

The alterantive would be to use safe_join and raw instead:

<%= safe_join people.map{|person| raw "'#{person.label}'"}, ', ' %> 

...or to tag the string as html_safe. However, it would be much more convenient, and also appropriate for the reasons described above, to skip HTML safety entirely when rendering LaTeX to PDF. Can this be achieved?

[kalsan]

Note: the problem with " and ' might actually be related to ERB escaping and not with html_safe: https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ERB/Util.html