elfeed-search fontface control and title string modification?

[heikkil]

I'd like to know what are the current plans for using fontfaces in elfeed-search buffer.

Some considerable time ago, the title of unread messages were shown in bold and that changed to normal after messages were read. I have not seen bold being used for a long time. I have no idea if that is the result of a policy change or something I might have done to my setup. I am now using modus-operandi that should be the gold standard theme for emacs, so that should not be the problem.

The only time I now see fontification in the elfeed-search buffer is when the title has a quotation mark, double quotes to be precise. In most cases, only one quotation character from the title is visible, so the blue font-lock-string-face continues over several titles until the next one is found. I'd appreciate a hint how to mitigate this unseemly effect. The habit of using quotes in titles is common in some news feeds, e.g. https://feeds.yle.fi/uutiset/v1/recent.rss?publisherIds=YLE_UUTISET&concepts=18-34953

Finally, since I am in the topic of the look of title strings, there are sources that use HTML tags inside the title string that are not rendered in the elfeed-search buffer. I'd like to find a clean way of filtering these out. Examples of this are http://www.theatlantic.com/feed/channel/science/ that starts some titles with "The Weekly Planet: " or http://feeds.nature.com/nature/rss/current with "Effects of rising CO₂".

[mjkalyan]

I am not 100% sure about this but I think it has to do with cl being deprecated. Elfeed still uses cl-loop to process elfeed-search-face-list.

[skeeto]

Nothing has changed in Elfeed regarding bold fonts in the search buffer, so this sounds like a local configuration issue. To isolate the problem, you can clone this repository and then "make virtual" to compile and run a default configuration Emacs with a copy of your Elfeed database, where you can test if various features are working correctly. When I run Elfeed this way even with the released-today Emacs 27.2 everything is working fine as far as search buffer fonts go.

[heikkil]

Thanks for replies and confirming that fontification should work like I assumed it should.

I tried by emacs configuration after disabling my elfeed completely. Then I loaded it without any of the helper functions that I wrote years ago and have served me well ever since. Executing only (use-package elfeed) and M-x elfeed brought up elfeed with correct fontification behaviour in the elfeed-search buffer. I need to find more time to dissect my code and figure out what is going wrong there.

However, HTML tags are still in titles. What would be a good way to process titles before they are displayed? Adding advice to some function, perhaps?

[skeeto]

HTML tags in titles is an old issue I've not yet resolved, so that one's expected. RSS disallows HTML elements in titles, but Atom allows it when type="html". Elfeed currently ignores the latter and never decodes the HTML in titles.