Re: [AUCTeX] How to configure TeX special characters?

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2017-05-01, at 15:46, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> a friend of mine has this problem: he does not want $, & and % to have
>> special meaning to (La)TeX, so he changes their catcodes to make them
>> un-special; to retain the possibility of inputting math, typesetting
>> tables and commenting out things, he assigns the respective catcodes to
>> some Unicode\setminus ASCII characters.
>>
>> Putting aside the question whether it's a good idea (personally I don't
>> like it very much, but I can see the rationale), how do I convince
>> AUCTeX to take that into consideration when font-locking?  I tried to
>> monkey-patch AUCTeX sources (for instance, I tried changing
>> "\\$\\$\\([^$]+\\)\\$\\$" in font-latex-make-user-keywords into
>> something like "〖\\([^$]+\\)〗", then even restarting Emacs
>> altogether), but to no avail.
>
> That would be a serious upstream battle.  Language-specific editing
> support relies on assumptions.  That is one reason that LaTeX has
> several editors catering to it pretty well while plain TeX (which does
> not really provide much in the line of document structuring) doesn't.
>
> I don't think that AUCTeX caters all that well for more serious breaches
> of convention.

Thanks for your prompt reply!

I am not sure about my personal stand on it.  On the one hand, it's
always saddening to find a piece in Emacs (or the "Emacs ecosystem")
which is not easily configurable.  OTOH, as I mentioned in the OP,
I agree that my friend's idea goes quite against established LaTeX
conventions.  OYAH, AFAIK ConTeXt already treats dollars etc. as normal
characters, so it's quite possible that AUCTeX will have to cater for
that particular thing anyway.

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski