Re: [AUCTeX-devel] patch for the documentation concerning prettifying and friends

[Tassilo Horn]

Uwe Brauer <address@hidden> writes:

> # HG changeset patch

Uh, you use a git <-> mercurial bridge?  At work, I'm shortly before
doing it the other way round. ;-)

> -* Prettifying::                 Displaying Greek and math macros as Unicode 
> characters
> +* Prettifying::                 Displaying Greek and math macros as Unicode 
> characters including super and subscripts 

The super/subscript thingy doesn't belong here.  It's a plain
font-latex.el feature and has nothing to do with prettify.el.  The
relevant custom option `font-latex-fontify-script' is already described
in the manual section "3.1.3 Fontification of mathematical constructs",
so please update its description there instead of distributing it in
different sections.

>  Font Locking
>  
> @@ -1819,7 +1819,7 @@
>  * Folding::                     Folding Macros and Environments
>  * Outline::                     Outlining the Document
>  * Narrowing::                   Restricting display and editing to a portion 
> of the buffer
> -* Prettifying::                 Displaying Greek and math macros as Unicode 
> characters
> +* Prettifying::                 Displaying Greek and math macros as Unicode 
> characters including super and subscripts 
>  @end menu
>  
>  @node Font Locking
> @@ -2589,7 +2589,17 @@
>  Emacs 25 is able to prettify symbols in programming language buffers,
>  @pxref{Misc for Programs,,,emacs,GNU Emacs Manual}.  The canonical
>  example is to display @code{(lambda () ...)} as @code{(λ () ...)} in
> -Lisp buffers.
> +Lisp buffers. Such a functionality was/is provided by x-symbol for
> +Xemacs a long time so Xemacs, x-symbol users will feel at home. There
> +is however an important difference, x-symbol translated the TeX macros
> +to some internal chars, which were then displayed by special designed
> +fonts. This lead to problems with various filling functions, slowed down
> +Xemacs and resulted sometimes in data corruption, however prettified
> +symbols could be deleted simply by delete or backspace. Emacs 25 uses an
> +entirely different approach relying on overlays. That makes prettifying
> +much faster and does not result in data corruption, however deleting
> +prettified symbols cannot be done by simply hitting delete or backspace,
> +one must use @code{kill-word} or @code{backward-kill-word}.

Please remove the description of how x-symbol did it for XEmacs and the
problems it had.  I don't think a comparison is not what a manual is
about.  Feel free to blog about the topic.

And what about not being able to deleting prettified symbols?  Of course
you can, it's just that this will just delete one character and not the
complete macro that gets displayed as a pretty symbol.

> +In addition you can configure Emacs so that the «^» and «_» in sub and
> +superscripts are not displayed. Strictly speaking this is not a feature
> +of @code{global-prettify-symbols-mode} nor of @AUCTeX{} but it enhances
> +the «WYSIWYG» feeling. To enable that feature you have to set the
> +variable @font-latex-fontify-script{} to ‘invisible’.

As said above, that should go into "3.1.3 Fontification of mathematical
constructs", and please update it with all possible values of the
variable, that is, the old values nil and t plus the two new values
`invisible' and `multi-level'.

Thanks,
Tassilo