On Fri, 22 Sep 2023, Arash Esbati <ar...@gnu.org> wrote:
> J. Xu <x...@stat.wisc.edu> writes:
>
>> reftex-view-crossref currently only finds reference to the current space
>> delineated word. For example, if I'm at (* being the point)
>>
>> \ref{foo *bar}
>>
>> and run reftex-view-crossref, it would find the definition of "bar"
>> instead of "foo bar".
>>
>> I wonder if this behaviour is intended?
>
> Yes, this is the intended behavior in terms of "this is what the code
> does": `reftex-view-crossref' starts like this:
>
> (defun reftex-view-crossref (&optional arg auto-how fail-quietly)
> (interactive "P")
> ;; See where we are.
> (let* ((macro (car (reftex-what-macro-safe 1)))
> (key (reftex-this-word "^{}%\n\r, \t"))
> ...
>
> The label key is extracted by `reftex-this-word' which is asked to
> ignore spaces with "^{}%\n\r, \t". I'm not sure if spaces were always
> allowed in labels, but they are by now (also other characters besides
> ASCII, IIRC). So we probably should fix this and allow spaces. But
> then we have to know what LaTeX does with linebreaks inside the \label
> argument, i.e.:
>
> \label{foo
> bar}
>
> I haven't tested this. Is LaTeX's behavior in this regard documented
> somewhere?
I couldn't find related documentation. I did a quick test and it looks
like a linebreak, carriage return, or tab is essentially converted to a
space. Specifically, the following pair works:
\label{foo
bar}
\ref{foo bar}
>
> And if we touch this, we should also change `reftex-label-illegal-re'.
>
> Personally, I recommend to use only this range [-a-zA-Z0-9_+=:;,.] for
> label names and be done with it.
>
Agreed. This issue only came up because I'm working on someone else's
manuscript. Oof, much pain.
> Best, Arash
