Re: doc for multi-line font-lock

[Stefan Monnier]

> The Lisp manual tells you not to use multi-line font-lock matchers,
> but NEWS talks about `font-lock-multiline'.  I'm rather unclear what
> the current situation is with font-lock, especially if I want to make
> things work in Emacs 21.3.

Setting font-lock-multiline to t should allow font-lock-keywords that
typically span a single line but sometimes a bit more (things like
<title>blabla</title>) to work correctly most of the time.

> I find the doc rather hard to follow, though I'm not sure how to
> improve it.

I think many people agree on the first part, and sadly they also agreed on
the second until now.

> A concrete example is that I wanted to do something that's probably a
> job for `font-lock-syntactic-face-function'.  I didn't know about that
> function and only found it by grovelling a mode I thought must be
> doing what I wanted.

Documenting its behavior is not something I'm looking forward to.
I'm responsible for introducing `font-lock-syntactic-face-function' as well
as for all of the code that uses it in Emacs (AFAIK), but I think
it's just a hack that's screaming for a replacement based on a significant
improvement to font-lock rather than a quick hack.


        Stefan