Re: define multi-line comments

[henry atting <nospam@literaturlatenight.de>]

David Hansen wrote:

> On Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:32:39 +0200 henry atting wrote:
>
>> David Hansen wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:46:37 +0200 henry atting wrote:
>>>
>>>> I have my own text mode (derived from text-mode), which defines some
>>>> syntax highlighting. Defining keywords is no problem but as far as I see
>>>> keywords don't work on serveral lines, e.g. this
>>>>
>>>>          (list "\".*\"" 0 'font-lock-variable-name-face t) 
>>>>
>>>> only highlights words or phrases till the line break.
>>>> Can anyone give me a hint how to get it work multi-line.
>>>
>>> There are some words about this in the Elisp manual, lookup
>>> `font-lock-multiline'.  But this is incredible complicated.
>>
>> Oh yes, you really might say this ;)
>>
>> In the meantime I found a way to do it. I looked into lua-mode.el where
>> mulit-line comments work and changed it according to my needs:
>>
>>         (list
>>        "\\(?:^\\|[^-]\\)\\(\"\\(=*\\)\\(?:.\\|\n\\)*?\"\\)"
>>        '(1 'font-lock-string-face t))
>
> Setting `font-lock-multiline' to `t' and using regexps that spawn more
> than one line works "a bit".  If it's not to important to highlight
> always correctly and if the regexp "usually" matches only one line this
> is an option as well.
>
>>
>>> But in many circumstances you can use `font-lock-syntactic-keywords' to
>>> make some region a "string" or "comment" and then use
>>> `font-lock-syntactic-face-function' to give it another face.
>>
>> Now I will take a look at this. Thanks :)
>
> Someone should tell the lua-mode developers about it...  This works
> perfectly well if you have one region and one face for the whole region.
> But it's not an option for regions with multiple faces (like e.g. long
> function declarations in C).

Because its only purpose is to highlight direct speech (in my
text-mode) it actually works very well.

Mmh, with `font-lock-syntactic-keywords' I couldn't get very far. I
found this in the manual:

,----
| — Variable: font-lock-syntactic-face-function
| [...]
| This can be used to highlighting different kinds of strings or comments
| differently. It is also sometimes abused together with
| font-lock-syntactic-keywords to highlight constructs that span multiple
| lines, but this is too esoteric to document here.
`----

which is not too encouraging. 

henry