Re: Writing a patch for the emacs Tex interface

[David Kastrup]

>>>>> "Lee" == Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> writes:

>>>>> "William" == William F Hammond <hammond@pluto.math.albany.edu> writes:
 Rod> However if I do {\em There was a {\bf cat} on the mat} Then,

 William> David is absolutely right.  The deprecation is in the 2nd
 William> edition of Lamport's basic book LaTeX: A Document
 William> Preparation System, 1994, which is 8 years old.

 Lee> Yeah.  So, I have been using \emph and \textbf for 5 years.


 William> You probably want: \emph{There was a \emph{cat} on the
 William> mat} or you may want \emph{There was a \textbf{cat} on
 William> the mat } if you really like gratuitous boldface.  See
 William> Lamport.

 Lee> But the deprecated method are still useful in some cases.  For example
 Lee> if your  emphasized or bold-ified things span  across paragraphs, then
 Lee> \emph or \textbf  may cause problems, whereas {\em  ...} and {\bf ...}
 Lee> works.  TeX will  choke if the parameters to a macro  (as in \emph) is
 Lee> too long,  but not when  a group  spans too wide  a scope (as  in {\em
 Lee> ..}).

For such cases the macros \sffamily, \itshape, \bfseries, \ttfamily
and the like are defined.  \em actually is in the same class as those,
fontwise, since it affects only the "shape" parameter of a font.

But \tt, \bf, \rm and the like do not switch just a single font
parameter, but the entire font.  You cannot use them to get, say, bold
italics.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
Email: David.Kastrup@t-online.de