Re: latex mode, nexted subscripts are unreadable

[Tim Hesterberg <timh@insightful.com>]

Karl,

Thanks for looking into this, and for the suggestion of customizing
the faces.

I tried customizing the superscript and subscript fonts, in two
different ways:
  menu:   Options : Customize Emacs : Specific Face
  modify-face
I could change the height to 80 (i.e. 8 point font).
This results in nested suscripts being the same size as the
first-level suscripts, and so prevents the problem with fonts
being too small.

However, the raising and lowering was messed up.  Now
$a_{b^c}$ makes $c$ elevated at the same level as the $c$ in $a^c$;
the raising is done relative to $a$ rather than to $b$.
Maybe this is a separate bug?

I also tried a relative value of 0.9.  This resulted in smaller
size changes, and fonts did not become unreadable until 5th level.
However, this also leaves the raising and lowering messed up.

I tried evaluating a modified defface definition  (in a temporary file,
not by changing tex-mode.el) but this had no effect.

Tim

>Hi Tim,
>
>Thanks for the report.
>
>    the nested suscripts are visible, but are still too tiny for comfort.
>    And they're not clearly visible - the gray letters end up with most of
>    the pixels light gray and a few of them darker.
>
>Unfortunately neither I nor Juri were able to reproduce this on our
>(non-Windows) systems.  
>
>Is there an Emacs developer who works on Windows who could look into this?
>
>    Is there a way to set a minimum font size for suscripts?
>
>Looking at tex-mode.el, it seems that faces named `subscript' and
>`superscript' are used for this.  By default, they are defined like this
>(both are just the same except for the name):
>
>    (defface subscript
>      '((t :height 0.8)) ;; :raise -0.3
>      "Face used for subscripts."
>      :group 'tex)
>
>The :height is presumably what makes it proportional to the next "level"
>up.  So perhaps it would work to override these definitions by changing
>those faces -- using customize is probably easiest -- to use an absolute
>font size.
>
>Best,
>Karl