Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: Fontifying of titles...

[David Kastrup]

Reiner Steib <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sat, Apr 09 2005, David Kastrup wrote:
>
>> So in the case of titles, sectioning and similar, I think we really
>> should adapt the line breaking to match the font size.  It is much
>> more problematic what to do when working with small print.
>>
>> Maybe we should really have _two_ values of fill-column, one for
>> ASCII, and one for the graphic display...
>
> I don't understand your suggestion.

Break the line when either the current number of characters exceeds
fill-column, or when the total displayed width exceeds fill-width.

>> Anyway, I think we _definitely_ should break title lines according
>> to their visual representation.  We don't want AUCTeX to format
>> stuff in a way that makes it look worst under AUCTeX.
>
> If the smaller sectioning `fill-column' is calculated _dynamically_,
> filling would change (even if with identical user settings)
> depending on depending on the properties on the _current_ display.
> I'm not enthusiastic about this idea[1].
> [1] Exaggeration: It reminds me of the stories about MS Word
> documents where the page breaks move around depending on the phase
> of the moon.

No breaks in the resulting LaTeX document are affected.  We don't fill
lines in verbatim-like environments.

To lessen the impression of randomness, my proposal was about just
breaking when the line would otherwise wrap.  This does not prevent a
line getting visually longer than other lines, but it at least avoids
the line getting a wrapped display, which is the worst behavior.

I think that we'll get less complaints, all in all, when the
formatting tends to avoid this than otherwise.  Perhaps we should
also check whether fill-column exceeds the window-width, and not do
anything in that case (there are people that try getting long lines by
setting fill-column to a large value) since the selected setting
clearly indicates a desire for overfull lines.

> But this would not make LaTeX documents of non-AUCTeX users (or
> older "AUCTeX documents") look good in AUCTeX even for well-filled
> documents (e.g. then the length of the section line is close to 80
> characters).

Well, so what?  We can't do magic.  Again, preview-latex has no
problems in that area, since its title lines will get wrapped by
LaTeX...

Actually, I take back the "we can't do magic" claim.  We could just
wrap the text in the buffer using the ASCII width, then
pseudo-reformat using the display width and putting a display property
of "\n" on the last space before the display end of line, and a
display property of " " on the newlines that are only for wrapping in
the ASCII representation.

I am not entirely sure that our users would be enthused about such a
change.  At the very least, one would also want to put appropriate
fringe markers to make sure people know what is happening.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum