Re: non-break-space in tutorial

[Miles Bader]

On 6/6/05, Juri Linkov <address@hidden> wrote:
> After a testing period (say, 1 week) I could remove the variable
> `show-non-break'.  There seems to be no need for this variable since
> highlighting can be disabled by inheriting `no-break-space' face
> from the default face.

No.  This is wrong for several reasons

1) Faces are global, but it's extremely desirable to disable special
treatment of NBSP (etc) on a per-buffer basis.  So we can't get rid of
`show-nonbreak-escape'.

2) The original treatment of NBSP -- displaying it like a normal
escape character, with backslash prefix and in the normal escape
character face -- is IMO better than your method, so _at the least_ it
should be user selectable, but it seems that your patch makes this
impossible.  [And I personally think it should be the default.]

3) Your patch treats "soft hyphens" in the same way as NBSP, and I'm
not sure this is desirable; it at least seems worthy of discussion.

Furthermore, we're supposed to be in some sort of pre-release state,
so please don't just install changes you _know_ to be controversial
without at least mentioning what you're going to do on the mailing
list first

BTW, something funny I noticed while testing, though I'm not sure
whether it is caused by your patch or not, is that when displaying on
a tty with `terminal-coding-system' set to nil, both NBSP and
soft-hyphen are show as "?".  Since most fonts simply display these
character in the same way as their non-special brothers, wouldn't be
good for emacs to do the translation itself so that they show up ok on
simple ascii terminals?

-Miles
-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.