Re: using glyphs by default in perl-mode

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 04 Jun 2013 21:27:19 -0400 Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote: 

>> See attached patch.  It only fixes comments and attempts to move to
>> prog-mode.el.  Maybe you'll know the way to fix it.  I get:
>> Attempt to autoload define-derived-mode while preparing to dump
>> If it's trivial to fix, please let me know how.  If not, I'll commit as
>> simple.el and update the ChangeLog.

SM> Just commit it in simple.el for now.  I'll move it later.

Done and in trunk.  Thanks for all the help and reviews from you and
Davis Herring.

If anyone wants to update http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PrettyLambda
and http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PrettySymbol feel free!

(Aside: I attempted to use `compose-region' to build more complicated
compositions besides a single character.  The docstring says the
COMPONENTS format can be several things, including:

"If it is a vector or list, it is a sequence of alternate characters and
composition rules, where (2N)th elements are characters and (2N+1)th
elements are composition rules to specify how to compose (2N+2)th
elements with previously composed N glyphs."

I stared at this for a while then I gave up.  It really needs one or two
examples and an alternate wording, because I have no idea what it says.)

I also thought about `put-text-property' of an image but that's pretty
ugly and special-cases all the code, plus it has update issues in some
cases (deleting characters and reinserting them doesn't trigger the
image again).  It would be really nice to be able to use
`compose-region' and use an image to create a glyph.  For now it's a
TODO but I think it would be a hit with users.  If anyone is interested
or wants to tell me how it could work, let me know.

The other TODO item is to simplify this support so it doesn't require
special effort when setting `font-lock-defaults'.  I don't know how that
would work internally so I'll wait for Stefan or someone else to give me
hints or implement it.

Thanks
Ted