Re: enriched-mode and switching major modes.

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Cc: rms@gnu.org, boris@gnu.org, alex@emacswiki.org,
> 	emacs-devel@gnu.org, alkibiades@gmx.de
> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 16:06:34 -0400
> 
> If it's explicit in the form of markup commands (as is the case in
> tex-mode), then it's a non-issue (i.e. it's now an issue for the user
> rather than for the word processor.

Not really, not with complex styles.  A style can have lots of
complicated settings, and it could be very hard to undesrtand which
ones are in effect, even with explicit markup, since some directives
that set the style can be very far away of the text you are copying.
It is even harder to understand what will happen when the copied text
removes some of the directives or stretches into another style area.

As the first approximation to guessing ``what the user wants'' I'd
simply remove all style settings from the copied text and applied the
settings of the target text portion when the text is pasted.  It is
not always the 100% right thing to do, but it is usually close, and
simple commands (such as renumber an itemized list) can be added to
fix whatever becomes broken as the result.