I wanted to have some text emphasized when immediately following a comma. I found in the manual the suggestion to use a zero-width space character. That works, except that it turns out that by default emacs actually displays the zero-width space as 1-pixel wide. That's not noticeable in a paragraph. But in an org-mode table, it causes cell boundaries to be slightly misaligned. And with more than one of these in a row, it becomes more than slightly. That is very annoying.
At first I did not understand what was happening. But then I found this post on stackexchange that explains it all very clearly, along with how to change emacs' default, either globally or just in certain modes: https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/65108/zero-width-space-shows-as-underscore Before I found this, I also stumbled on suggestions (apparently predating adoption of the zero-width space paradigm) to customize `org-emphasis-regexp-components'. That actually works very nicely for my purpose, so I'll probably stick with that. But the point of this post is to suggest that the org-mode manual ought to document these things more fully. The section (12.2 Emphasis and Monospace) that mentions the zero-width space approach ought to also mention that by default in emacs these are not actually zero width. Something like the description in the linked post would be great. And for `org-emphasis-regexp-components', as far as I can tell this variable is not mentioned at all anywhere in the manual. I suspect maybe this is because it's a kind of kludgy variable and maybe its use should not be encouraged. But it could at least be mentioned. I only learned of its existence from those older posts I mentioned above. I don't know if this list is the right place to make such a suggestion. Should I submit a bug report with some suggested modifications to the manual? Or is this all documented somewhere already and I just didn't find it? ***NOTE***: I gather there's some controversy about the zero-width space approach, especially in regard to exports. I very much don't want to trigger that debate! I'm merely suggesting the manual say a bit more about how things currently work, so others won't spend as much time as I did figuring it out :) -David
