It worked using customize, thanks. And thanks for the explanation, Nick. At least my approach to set the value would not work at all without an explicit call to org-set-emph-re, since it relied on the variable being already defined. It might be of minor interest, anyway, I've attached a patch-suggestion that would clearify the usage sufficiently, at least for me...
Best regards, Philipp On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 03:50:35PM -0400, Nick Dokos wrote: > Sebastien Vauban <wxhgmqzgw...@spammotel.com> wrote: > > > You have to make that customization *before* loading Org in your .emacs > > file. > > Weird, never really understood why, but that's like that. > > > > The point is that the value of org-emphasis-alist (as well as the value > of org-emphasis-regexp-components) is used in order to calculate the > value of org-emph-re by calling the function org-set-emph-re afterwards: > it's org-emph-re that's used for the all the gory calculations, not > org-emphasis-alist, which just provides a nicer interface. > > So if you arrange to call the org-set-emph-re function afterwards, you > can change org-emphasis-alist at any time. Customize makes it easy, in > that it does that automatically (see the :set property > of org-emphasis-alist). > > If you do the setq before loading org, then what happens is that when the > defcustom is encountered, the value of the :set property (a function) is > called: the modified value of org-emphasis-alist is then used to calculate > org-emph-re, instead of the original default. If you do it after, none > of that happens and it's as if you never changed it. > > Nick > > PS BTW, the docstring for the variable says: "Use customize to modify > this, or restart Emacs after changing it" but I'm not sure that's > correct: if you change the variable in one session, the value is not > going to be propagated to the next session, unless you use customize > or put the setq in .emacs. In the latter case, it's not going to work > unless you do it the way Seb describes: set it before loading Org. > So restarting emacs is *not* enough. Am I missing something? > >
diff --git a/lisp/org.el b/lisp/org.el index 3bf338d..c70d94d 100644 --- a/lisp/org.el +++ b/lisp/org.el @@ -3770,7 +3770,9 @@ characters, the face to be used by font-lock for highlighting in Org-mode Emacs buffers, and the HTML tags to be used for this. For LaTeX export, see the variable `org-export-latex-emphasis-alist'. For DocBook export, see the variable `org-export-docbook-emphasis-alist'. -Use customize to modify this, or restart Emacs after changing it." +The value of org-emphasis-alist is used to calculate a regular expression +during startup; changing it manually may not have an effect. +You should use customize to modify this. Otherwise, see `org-set-emph-re'." :group 'org-appearance :set 'org-set-emph-re :type '(repeat
