Re: Fwd: overlay face property not used for after-string property

[Richard Stallman]

    I would like to strongly suggest that overlay before-string, display,
    and after-string properties should *not* be affected by the
    text-property face properties in the buffer.

That would be easy to implement, but it seems to me that in some cases
text properties should influence these strings, just as region
highlighting should.

Since various features use overlays to do something analogous to
region highlighting, that suggests that in SOME cases we do want one
overlay's faces to affect the strings provided by another overlay, as
you asked for recently.  A study of the interaction of those features
with something like linum might make it possible to figure out some
good rules for such interaction.