Re: Writing a patch for the emacs Tex interface

[Lee Sau Dan]

>>>>> "William" == William F Hammond <hammond@pluto.math.albany.edu> writes:

    Rod> However if I do {\em There was a {\bf cat} on the mat} Then,

    William> David is absolutely right.  The deprecation is in the 2nd
    William> edition of Lamport's basic book LaTeX: A Document
    William> Preparation System, 1994, which is 8 years old.

Yeah.  So, I have been using \emph and \textbf for 5 years.


    William> You probably want: \emph{There was a \emph{cat} on the
    William> mat} or you may want \emph{There was a \textbf{cat} on
    William> the mat } if you really like gratuitous boldface.  See
    William> Lamport.

But the deprecated method are still useful in some cases.  For example
if your  emphasized or bold-ified things span  across paragraphs, then
\emph or \textbf  may cause problems, whereas {\em  ...} and {\bf ...}
works.  TeX will  choke if the parameters to a macro  (as in \emph) is
too long,  but not when  a group  spans too wide  a scope (as  in {\em
...}).

Of course,  having lengthy, contiguous  bolded and emphasized  text is
very very bad  style (both in terms of  typesetting and writing).  The
author should better rethink, rephrase and reorganize his writing.


-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦(Big5)                    ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ) 

E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee