Re: entity font-locking problem when inserting text in middle of buffer

[Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com>]

Hi Eric,

On Jun 3, 2010, at 9:23 PM, Eric S Fraga wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I don't think this is something that can be fixed but it has been
> driving me crazy so I thought I'd email to point it out in case
> anybody else runs into it.  If you have org-pretty-entities set to t,
> org-mode does a lovely job of showing all kinds of characters.
> However, the regexp for the font-locking for this makes sense for when
> adding text to the end of a buffer or with point immediately before
> any :alnum: character (e.g. not a space).  It makes less sense if you
> start inserting some text in the middle of a sentence, say, which I do
> often when writing papers...
>
> See attached image for an example.  If you have something like "some
> text", place point after the first "e" and start typing "\left", as
> soon as you type the "e", you will get the \le symbol despite typing
> the "f" immediately after.  The regexp for font-locking is fine for
> converting text that has already been typed; it is less effective when
> inserting the text.

I think that it should behave much better now, please give it a try.
Also the problem in comment lines should be gone, hopefully.

>
> If, instead, point were at the first "t" in "some text", there's no
> problem inserting "\left".

Good opportunity to plug cdlatex.el.  If you have it installed and
then turn on org-cdlatex-mode, one of the many things that will work
then is:

You type

      l r { TAB

and get

     \left\{ \right\}

with the cursor in the middle.

Similarly:

You type

     f r TAB

and get

     \frac{}{}

with the cursor in the first set of braces, TAB will move you into
the second, and then out.

If you are using a lot of math, this should be quite helpful.

Cheers

- Carsten


>
> Unfortunately, I cannot suggest a fix.  It's not that serious a
> problem; I just wanted to highlight it for the mailing list.
>
> In the image, you'll also see that there are some problems with
> underlined text when org-hide-emphasis-markers is set to t.  Again,
> not a serious problem (and underlining is really a hold-over from
> typewriter days, as I believe Carsten would say... ;-).