Hrvoje> Jan Vroonhof <vroonhof(a)math.ethz.ch&gt; writes: Hrvoje> Not really (although it may look that way at the start). Hrvoje> The font-lock code wants to apply certain properties to Hrvoje> parts of the buffer, merging or breaking the extents as Hrvoje> needed. This is exactly what the text-properties are for. Could you be more specific? The documentation says something quite different: text-properties are for attaching properties to characters rather than intervals. That seems like exactly the _wrong_ thing to do with strings and comments, both of which should be locked up in an unbreakable (from the point of view of font-lock) extent once identified; the individual characters in them should never be considered "locally". OTOH, I don't see why splitting an extent or merging neighboring extents (which should be constant time, with relatively high overhead I suppose) should be more efficient than iterating over a (possibly lengthy) interval of characters (linear time but possibly lower overhead, depending on the implementation, although I find it hard to see why it would be necessarily much less than for extents). -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +1 (298) 53-5091