Re: function arguments downcased in help buffers

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 4:16 PM, Drew Adams <address@hidden> wrote:

>  Rereading the 2004 archive thread "new *Help* argument highlighting" wasn't 
> too
>  reassuring. It didn't seem that there was such a complete consensus as you
>  suggest

I didn't say "complete consensus". That does not exist in emacs-devel.
But if you've read the thread, most of the initial complains were (as
usual) about the choice of face and whether it was too intrusive, or
too little ;-) Once someone (not me, I think it was Richard) suggested
italics and lowercase (to follow the printed docs) there was pretty
much no more complains until now.

In fact, there was considerable discussion (and some agreement, I'd
say) about ways to *add* more markup to the docstrings, like using
@v{VAR} to unequivocally distinguish variable referencies.

>  Your answer to Stefan's opinion was that then was not the time to question 
> this
>  feature, presumably since it was late in the 22 release cycle (!), and that 
> it
>  could always be revisited later:

That's a nice selective reading. Stefan is saying that the simple
feature I implemented is working, and that he thinks we're wasting
time discussing *additional* features, like @var{VAR}. And in my
answer, as your quote shows, I agreed with him about that.

>  FWIW, I don't mind the feature. I do think it's good to have a face for 
> this, so
>  that users can customize the behavior. But I think the default of italic 
> doesn't
>  stand out enough, at least in emacs -Q on Windows. IMO, bold italic is 
> better,
>  and italic uppercase (bold or non-bold) is even better.

I don't mind the default, just the feature. But the current default
was not chosen by accident. Some people didn't like uppercase italics
(I think they're horrible, FWIW), some people liked to get rid of
uppercase altogether, etc. I think you're reopening one of *those*
discussions, but don't let me stop you from doing it :)

>  BTW, using Customize to change the face, and then setting it for the current
>  session, changes the text in an existing *Help* buffer immediately (good),
>  _except_ when you change to the default face by removing all checkmarks in
>  Customize. In that case, you need to use the help command again (e.g. C-h f) 
> in
>  order to get the uppercase. No big deal, but a slight inconsistency.

I try to stay as far away from customize as possible, so, no idea.

 Juanma