happytoexplain rightfully expands on the importance of square brackets as orthographic signifiers inside quoted text, marking a temporary suspension of the literal quoting context.

What they fail to address though, is that while "[square-brackets are] notable", this convention turns out to be problematic when dealing with markdown, or other structured text with unusual semantic orthographic markers. Square brackets "work" (scare-quote!) because they are unusual.

But what to do when dealing with an original text that contains square-brackets, such as a comment about square brackets, or computer source code? There are also some forms of art revolving around unusual punctuation, especially from the 20th century!

And this doesn't even touch the fact that the spellings "square-brackets" and "square brackets" both seem to be considered acceptable, notwithstanding the question whether minimizing the square-bracketed portion of quoted and editorialized text should include whitespace, such as in

> If it were part of the original[ non-square-bracketed] quote[...]

Also, [...] is seen as offensive and insensitive quoting by some scholars.

Quite a conundrum!