Re: [bug] org-do-emphasis-faces breaks with incomplete emphasis

[Tim Cross]

Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com> writes:

> hi tim,
>
> tanks for your replies.
>
> 1.  the same problem occurs without any * in the buffer.

It will occur with any of the markup special characters e.g. *, =, _, +, /

>
> 2.  the emphasis regexps are supposed to be limited to a few lines.

Are they? What is 'a few'? This also won't work if you use
visual-line-mode and don't use auto-fill (as your paragraphs are then
just one long line).

>
> 3.  they are also supposed to not try to match dissimilar delimiiters.
>

Not quite sure what you mean here.

> the problem is that
>
> hi =something
>
> stops all emphasis of all types in the entire rest of hte bguffer even
> if the buyffer contains many lines.  this sems unusual to me.
>
> it does not break anything befofre it.
>
> so i think your hypothesis of what i am talking about might possibly
> not match what i am talking about at all.
>

I'm not disagreeing with what your saying. I think the reason the rest
of the file doesn't get parsed correctly is because the single markup
character has made the syntax inconsistent and broken.

The problem is I don't think there is a good fix for this which doesn't
introduce other problems. If the regexp which does the matching is
supposed to limit its search to just a specific number of lines, then
perhaps it is broken. However, I'm not sure what 'a few lines' really
means (2?, 5?, 10?). I also know from past experience that trying to
define font-lock matches which work in such a way is complex, error
prone and often results in a considerable performance hit.

Bottom line, if you want to use the characters reserved for markup
purposes as just plain characters, you have to somehow quote them or
mark them as being 'verbatim' characters. I do think it would be useful
to have something in the manual on this under the markup section.

--
Tim Cross