Re: Stealth fontification GCs a lot

[Ralf Angeli <angeli@iwi.uni-sb.de>]

* Richard Stallman (2005-04-12) writes:

> I will try turning it off.  But I wonder if just making it wait
> longer would make it a desirable feature.  What do you think?

Turning of stealth font locking will result in some drawbacks for the
folding feature of AUCTeX.  Folding in this context means that certain
LaTeX constructs or just their markup is hidden.  Instead a
placeholder or the content of the construct is shown.  The original
content is revealed and available for editing, as soon as point is
moved into the folded area.

For example the text

  This is some \emph{important} text.\footnote{Confer other examples.}

will be shown as

  This is some /important/ text.[f]

(where /.../ means that the enclosing text is displayed in italics).

A standard usage pattern is to open a LaTeX file and perform folding
for the whole buffer.

Now how is this related to stealth font locking?  In order for the
"important" string in the example above to be displayed in italics,
the original string inside the \emph construct has to be fontified
already because folding will pick up the original string with all its
text properties and place it into an overlay.  We currently don't have
a mechanism similar to jit-lock, so folding a whole buffer is in fact
done immediately.  In order to get a correct fontification of the
generated overlays we currently advise users to wait a few seconds
after opening a LaTeX file before doing this operation in order to let
stealth font locking fontify the whole buffer.

For me personally this workaround is working quite well.  But if
stealth font looking was disabled we'd have to find a different way of
achieving this.  It is planned to hook somehow into jit-lock for this,
but I haven't found a good and reliable way for it yet.  Another
possibility would be to re-enable stealth font locking for buffers
under AUCTeX's control (in case folding mode is activated).

-- 
Ralf