Re: Tick Reduction

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> And, of course, we could also consider using proportional fonts for the
> non-code prose bits:

I forgot to mention how that'd work: It's pretty easy to identify Lisp
snippets in doc strings -- they're either in `' pairs or they're
paragraphs of texts that start with ; or (, so we can identify them
pretty reliably automatically.  So I think we'd get 93% there without
altering any doc strings.

We'd need to add a directive (like we did with literal ticks with \\='
etc) to mark out sections that should not have a proportional font for
bits where the automatic algo mis-guesses, like when you have non-Lisp
tables in the doc strings.  Those are pretty rare, though.

The most challenging bits are doc strings that are written in a
semi-columnar fashion, like

--------
Generate a PostScript syntactic chart image of the region in an EPS file.

Generate an EPS file for each production in the region.
The EPS file name has the following form:

   <PREFIX><PRODUCTION>.eps

<PREFIX>     is given by variable ‘ebnf-eps-prefix’.
             The default value is "ebnf--".

<PRODUCTION> is the production name.
             Some characters in the production file name are replaced to
             produce a valid file name.  For example, the production name
             "A/B + C" is modified to produce "A_B_+_C", and the EPS
             file name used in this case will be "ebnf--A_B_+_C.eps".

WARNING: This function does *NOT* ask any confirmation to override existing
         files.
--------

Fortunately, we have some pretty good guesses in the filling machinery
for these cases, and we could reuse that code here to identify these
bits and then use `align-to' to align this stuff up.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no