References in txt documents are not recognised at the beginning of para

[smyslov]

Describe the issue

If an I-D is submitted in txt format, then html and pdf versions are automatically generated for it. With this process references in the text (in the form "[xxxx]") are recognised and replaces with links to the referenced documents. However, if the construction "[xxxx]" is at the beginning of a paragraph, then it is not recognised as a reference and is left out.

As an example see https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ipsecme-rfc8229bis/07/

Section 7.4 starts with a reference to RFC6311, which is not replaced with appropriate link neither in the html, nor in pdf versions.
The same situation is in Section 10 (page 22) with reference to RFC5961.

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the IETF's Code of Conduct

[larseggert]

This is an issue with https://github.com/ietf-tools/rfc2html, which has a lot of hacky regex code.

[rjsparks]

And to be quite specific, when you say html and pdf versions, you mean htmlized-text and pdfed-htmlized-text. (As opposed to the html and pdf output from v3 xml input).