Zvi Har'El wrote:
I tried to use view with the 'man' syntax, for example on the file vimtutor.man
obtained by
GROFF_NO_SGR=y groff -Tascii -man $(man -w vimtutor) > vimtutor.man
(see http://www.math.technion.ac.il/~rl/etc/vimtutor.man)
(this is not the file vimtutor.man in the vim distribution - the latter
doesn't include embedded backspaces).
I have the following problem: while the character before an embedded backspace
is ignored (sort of: it is colored white), the backspace is printed as a ^H.
I would expect the two characters to be skipped all together. (snip)
Why would you expect that? Syntax highlighting is highlighting, not
inline folding. Vim doesn't support inline folding. Vince Negri has
provided a patch to vim's source (http://vince.negri.googlepages.com/)
which permits inline folding, though. I've used that feature in AnsiEsc
(http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=302) which
highlights text using Ansi Escape sequences (while suppressing the
escape sequences themselves).
However, it is unrealistic to expect that man.vim would support Negri's
unofficial patch; in fact, there's not many scripts that do. One
natural use for such a feature would be to allow LaTeX files to be
displayed using its embedded directives while suppressing the directives
themselves, which would make for nice LaTeX editing.
Unfortunately, IMHO, inline folding didn't get enough votes during vim
7.0's development, and Bram is uncomfortable with the idea of inline
folding because it, naturally enough, suppresses information (Vince's
patch typically folds all lines but the current one). At least, that's
how I understand the state of things.
Regards,
Chip Campbell
