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

[Tassilo Horn]

Uwe Brauer <address@hidden> writes:

Hi Uwe,

>    > 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.
>
> Hm, I see your point, but there is one point to keep in mind. I think
> today Auctex is the standard Emacs package for any serious LaTeX
> editing, (well there is vanilla GNU emacs LaTeX mode and there is
> cdlatex mode, but the later is a minor mode compatible with auctex,
> while the former well I don't know who the heck could use it.)
>
> Be it as it may, I think it would be good if the auctex.texi had some
> section describing all sort of SEMI WYSIWYG stuff.
>
> So what's about the following idea:
> I do the changes you suggest but I add a short section entitled say.
> (Semi) WYSIWYG features in which I mention
>
>     -  preview 
>
>     - prettifying
>
>     - and the Fontification of mathematical constructs",
>
> And the links to the relevant sections.

Sounds good, and I think the beginning of "3 Controlling Screen Display"
already does a bit of that.  It would be good if you could rework that
text a bit so that it mentions and links the essentially two different
WYSIWYG methods: 1. Preview (let LaTeX render the constructs to images
that are displayed in the buffer) and 2. Prettification and font-latex's
Fontification of mathematical constructs (just change the display of
certain constructs; more light-weight but not as WYSIWYG in comparison
to preview).

(I think you'd usually use just one of the two although it might be that
you can use both of them.  In that case, moving into a previewed
construct would show the text with prettified symbol, and moving into a
prettified symbol would show the actual macro.)

> Here is what I mean: \alpha --> prettified α 
>
> α
>  ^cursor, I hit backspace
>
> I obtain \alph
>
> And the prettifying of this symbol is for course disabled.
>
> The point is I «see» a char, namely the prettified α, and expect to
> delete it like any char using backspace (or delete) but I cannot since
> \alpha is just represented not converted to α.

Yeah, I guessed that.  But I think the current behavior is not hard to
grasp when you know that prettify just changes the display of what's
written, and it also has advantages.  For example, if \quu and \quux are
two different prettified symbols, you can change from a mistyped \quux
to \quu just by deleting a character.  You don't need to delete the
complete macro and write it anew.

Bye,
Tassilo