emphasis in embedded text

[David Zelinsky]

I wanted to have some text emphasized when immediately following a
comma.  I found in the manual the suggestion to use a zero-width space
character.  That works, except that it turns out that by default emacs
actually displays the zero-width space as 1-pixel wide.  That's not
noticeable in a paragraph.  But in an org-mode table, it causes cell
boundaries to be slightly misaligned.  And with more than one of these
in a row, it becomes more than slightly.  That is very annoying.

At first I did not understand what was happening.  But then I found this
post on stackexchange that explains it all very clearly, along with how
to change emacs' default, either globally or just in certain modes:

https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/65108/zero-width-space-shows-as-underscore

Before I found this, I also stumbled on suggestions (apparently
predating adoption of the zero-width space paradigm) to customize
`org-emphasis-regexp-components'.  That actually works very nicely for
my purpose, so I'll probably stick with that.


But the point of this post is to suggest that the org-mode manual ought
to document these things more fully.  The section (12.2 Emphasis and
Monospace) that mentions the zero-width space approach ought to also
mention that by default in emacs these are not actually zero width.
Something like the description in the linked post would be great.

And for `org-emphasis-regexp-components', as far as I can tell this
variable is not mentioned at all anywhere in the manual.  I suspect
maybe this is because it's a kind of kludgy variable and maybe its use
should not be encouraged.  But it could at least be mentioned.  I only
learned of its existence from those older posts I mentioned above.


I don't know if this list is the right place to make such a suggestion.
Should I submit a bug report with some suggested modifications to the
manual?  Or is this all documented somewhere already and I just didn't
find it?


***NOTE***: I gather there's some controversy about the zero-width space
approach, especially in regard to exports.  I very much don't want to
trigger that debate!  I'm merely suggesting the manual say a bit more
about how things currently work, so others won't spend as much time as I
did figuring it out :)


-David