Re: Improving fontification support for biblatex qualified citation lists

[Gustavo Barros]

Hi Arash,

On Wed, 10 May 2023 at 07:35, Arash Esbati <arash@gnu.org> wrote:

> Thanks for looking at this and your ideas about this issue.  To be
> honest, I'm not convinced that we should go through this only in order
> to get cite lists working.  The benefits for some macros provided by one
> single package, namely biblatex, seem too low to me.  We have a
> non-perfect solution now, but I guess we can live with it.  Why do need
> the fontification, jinx?

Thanks for looking into this.

Well, I've long yearned for a better fontification for them (you may
recall: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/425883). I am a regular user
of citation lists, and frequently long ones at that.

However, yes, now I'm using Jinx, and fontification became
"functional" besides the eye candy. And indeed that's why I'm looking
into this. Truth be told though that Jinx excludes
`font-lock-variable-name-face' meaning the optional arguments of
citation commands are not spell checked
(https://github.com/minad/jinx/issues/25), so I'd need special
treatment for these macros anyway. Thus, I really proposed this
because it seemed simple enough and a fontification improvement.

For the purposes of Jinx I cooked a function akin to
`font-latex-match-command-with-arguments' which handles unlimited
number of arguments and also instructs Jinx to spell check the
optional arguments (under my setup). It is not too complicated either.
Btw, I did send you that message in that Jinx thread in emacs-devel
about the use of faces to handle spell checking exclusion
(https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2023-04/msg00512.html,
though perhaps that thread was not the best place for me to chime in).
And I'm still hoping someone will get interested in this. It is a
really powerful and appealing approach for the problem. Not almighty,
not without its own set of issues, but very promising. And, as I said
there, there's no reason to assume it couldn't be used by the built-in
spell checking packages. I'm still playing with that stuff, and I'd be
happy to discuss and share if there's interest.

Best,
Gustavo.