Re: [O] [dev] footnotes improvements

[Matt Lundin]

Nicolas Goaziou <address@hidden> writes:

>> First, a general consideration: my vote would be for highlighting the
>> entire footnote label, including the brackets. IMO, leaving the brackets
>> in the default face makes it more difficult to scan the buffer.
>> (Similarly, I think it might be nice to fontify the entire contents of
>> inline footnotes.)
>
> I tend to disagree here:
>
> - if we fontify the whole contents, it may override any special
>   fontification inside the inlined footnote (i.e. links, emphasis).
>   Moreover, it would look ugly with multi-lines footnotes (white spaces
>   at the beginning of the line are also fontified).

Yes, I can see how overriding the fontification of links might be an
issue. FWIW, auctex/font-latex provides a nice example of the behavior I
have in mind. The face inside of the footnote macro overrides some
faces, but not others. Leading whitespace indented, multi-line footnotes
is not fontified.

> - if we fontify the label and the brackets, it might be difficult to
>   distinguish when two or more footnotes are bound together. In the case
>   of a single inline footnote, the closing bracket would look silly when
>   fontified alone in the middle of the text.
>
> - fontifying only labels is enough to spot quickly a footnotes, and is
>   useful when you want to reuse an already defined label.

Could we perhaps provide an option to fontify the brackets, if only to
preserve the traditional behavior? I use footnotes that look like
this.[fn:6592605c] I find them much easier to scan visually when the
brackets and "fn:" are also highlighted.

> That being said, I agree that the actual fontification process needs to
> be tweaked a bit more (i.e. is buggy and not in is final state). Let me
> improve this during the next week, then, if needed, we will discuss
> again about it.
>
>> Square brackets containing digits inside of footnotes cause some issues.
>> The primary use for such brackets would be to include LaTeX cite macros
>> inside of footnotes. I imagine this might be tricky to fix, as [25]
>> looks exactly like a footnote label.
>
> [25] isn't recognized as a footnote label, as LaTeX macros have
> precedence over footnotes (`org-footnote-at-reference-p' dismisses any
> footnote matching a part of a LaTeX macro). The problem is that, at the
> moment, footnote contents are not protected from further processing.
> Alas, unprotected macros are not seen as macros by LaTeX exporter. One
> solution would be to protect the contents, but I have first to look at
> the HTML exporter, as the reason might be different there.

Indeed. It was the html exporter that treated the brackets as a
footnote. The LaTeX exporter, by contrast, escaped the curly brackets.

> Again, I will have a look at all of this during the week to come. Stay
> tuned !

Thanks!
Matt