The raise display property appears to be broken in Emacs 23.2.1 running on Mac OS X 10.5.8 (using --with-ns). I first noticed this in AucTeX when the subscripts did not drop as they did with say Carbon Emacs 22. But I can reproduce the behavior using Emacs -Q even in fundamental mode. When one character, say, is given the raise property, e.g., (raise -0.3), the entire line shifts (and spaces out somewhat), and the cursor becomes taller when over that character. But the character itself does not drop. This is easily seen in an AucTeX buffer (either plain-TeX-mode or LaTeX-mode): type $A_f$, and the f is shrunken as it should but the line goes down so that the A and f have the same top. But for a simple test in Fundamental mode, type "hello, world!" and position the cursor on the second ell. Then do (text-properties-at (point)) ; returns nil (add-text-properties (point) (1+ (point)) '(display (raise -0.3))) ; returns t, line shifts down, cursor grows tall (text-properties-at (point)) ; returns (display (raise -0.3)) (forward-char) (text-properties-at (point)) ; returns nil (backward-char 2) (text-properties-at (point)) ; returns nil If instead one does (raise 0.3), the behavior is *exactly the same*, the line shifts down and the cursor grows tall. Using Carbon Emacs 22 as a comparison, the same steps there produce a single dropped (or raised with positive value) ell in an otherwise unaffected line. This is the proper behavior. The information from report-emacs-bug (under Emacs -Q) is appended below. Thanks, Chris In GNU Emacs 23.2.1 (i386-apple-darwin9.8.0, NS apple-appkit-949.54) of 2010-11-09 on christopher-genoveses-macbook-pro.local Windowing system distributor `Apple', version 10.3.949 configured using `configure '--with-ns'' Important settings: value of $LC_ALL: nil value of $LC_COLLATE: nil value of $LC_CTYPE: nil value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil value of $LC_MONETARY: nil value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil value of $LC_TIME: nil value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8 value of $XMODIFIERS: nil locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix default enable-multibyte-characters: t Major mode: Any (esp. AucTeX and fundamental-mode) Minor modes in effect: tooltip-mode: t mouse-wheel-mode: t menu-bar-mode: t file-name-shadow-mode: t global-font-lock-mode: t font-lock-mode: t auto-encryption-mode: t auto-compression-mode: t line-number-mode: t transient-mark-mode: t Recent input: C-h c C-w s-x x r e p o r t - e m a c s - b u g Recent messages: For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type C-h C-a. 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