Subject: Re: bug#42267: Fontification takes a long time when an equation contains a double prime

From: Ikumi Keita <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Jul 2020 18:48:43 +0900

Hi PierGianLuca,

>>>>> PierGianLuca Porta Mana <[email-masked]> writes:
> I wonder what other people's opinions would be about turning *off*
> raw-quotes highlighting by default (is it on by default?)

Yes, it's on by default, and can be turned off by setting the customize
option `font-latex-quotes' to nil.

> – or maybe eliminating it altogether.
> There would be several reason for this:

> - Quirks with apostrophes used in math mode, as the present bug
> showed; and also the complexity of distinguishing a genitive
> apostrophe ("the students' books") from a closing quote mark in a
> single-quote style, which often occurs in British writings for
> example.

I think those cases don't matter. The default settings of font-latex.el
don't interact with such single apostrophe, and only respond to doubled
apostrophe '' and doubled backquote ``, possibly along with French or
German style quotes. (See the doc string of `font-latex-quote-list'.)

> - Quirks with multi-paragraph quotes, when one uses the quotation
> style that repeats the opening quotes (but not the closing quotes) at
> each paragraph.

If there are many ``s without matching ''s, they are displayed with
warning color. I agree that that warning color would be annoying for
users who have such style of writing. (However, it seems that no users
of AUCTeX complain about it currently. Do you think that there are
potentially many such users actually?)

> - Syntactically it's best to introduce quotations with an appropriate
> macro, eg \enquote{} from the csquotes package, which also
> automatically takes care of quotation styles like the ones mentioned
> above.

Well, I suppose that many users still prefer casual style ``...'' over
\enquote{} etc. because the former is easier to type.

To be honestly :-), the highlighting of ``...'' is not an important
feature for me because most LaTeX documents I encounter are oriented for
math and physics, and have very few ``...''s. So I don't object to
eliminate that feature if a lot of people have opinions to do so.

Regards,
Ikumi Keita