Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Bug#624735: Displays \it with an italic '\'

[Josh Triplett]

On Mon, May 09, 2011 at 10:15:45PM +0200, Ralf Angeli wrote:
> * Josh Triplett (2011-05-09) writes:
> 
> > On Mon, May 09, 2011 at 09:40:39PM +0200, Ralf Angeli wrote:
> >> 
> >> I'd say yes.  Fontifying the whole macro looks more consistent to me
> >> than fontifying only the part after the backslash.
> >
> > Doing so makes the '\' look like a '|'.
> 
> I'm using DejaVu Sans Mono with a size of 17 pixels here and the two
> characters can be distinguished easily.  Maybe the font you are using is
> suboptimal?

DejaVu Sans Mono here as well.  I can distinguish the characters, but I
wouldn't say "easily"; it takes staring at the unusual-looking italic
'\' more than once. :)

> Also, in which context or use case would it be a big problem if the
> characters where not easily distinguishable?

In my case, I encountered this problem when staring at a complex TeX
macro, which ran several commands in a row, along the lines of
\foo\it\bar\baz.  The italic '\' characters caused by the formatting of
\it caused me quite a bit of confusion when trying to decipher it, until
I figured out that they really did represent backslashes.  It took me
some time to parse the \it in the first place, since I didn't see the
characteristic '\'.

- Josh Triplett