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From: gildea@BBN.COM (Stephen Gildea)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: Fill-paragraph with TeX.
Message-ID: <8902221933.AA23116@prep.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 22 Feb 89 19:46:30 GMT
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    Date: 22 Feb 89 08:18:16 GMT
    From: Kevin Thompson <eos!ptolemy!kthompso@labrea.stanford.edu>
    
    I do a lot of editing within tex-mode and LaTeX mode, and often have words
    that begin with a "\" in my paragraphs.  If such words are at the beginning
    of lines, emacs seems not to respond properly to fill-paragraph; ...


This behavior is intentional.  In the usual case where backslashes
appear at the beginning of a line, they are not part of the paragraph
and should not be filled into it.  Often the backslash is part of a
command that separates two paragraphs.  Two examples:

  \subsection{Focal Mechanism of the Main Shocks}
  The focal mechanism of the second main shock ($m_b = 6.0$), shown in
  Figure 3, was determined from long-period arrivals at World-Wide
  Standard Seismographic network stations.  Both {\em S\/} and {\em P\/}
  wave first motions were used; however, the solution is more strongly
  constrained by the {\em S\/} wave polarizations.  The results are
  shown in Table 1.\marginboxed{Table 1}

  \item
  Design and implementation of software for real-time data acquisition.
  \item
  Device driver writing.
  \item
  Graphics library implementation.


Since Emacs cannot easily decide whether a particular backslash is
part of the paragraph text or not, it must treat them all the same.
Since it is much more common for a "word" beginning with a backslash
to *not* be text, Emacs assumes that is always the case.  Looking at
the first example above, we see that all uses of backslash that are
within the paragraph do not start words (that is, are not preceded by
whitespace).

Of course, if the normal behavior of TeX mode isn't right for you, it
is easy to change.  Try the following in your .emacs file:

(setq TeX-mode-hook
      '(lambda ()
	 (setq paragraph-start "^[ \t]*$\\|^[\f%]" ;don't look at backslash
	       paragraph-separate paragraph-start)))

 < Stephen