Create an "opaque" comment macro to hide part of the code to the syntax checker. (low priority!)

[Rmano]

There are, in the wild, "funny" templates that do very strange things; sometimes it would be useful to mark part of your text/code as invisible for the syntax highlighter parser. I will male just an example here...

For example, the MDPI journal templates issues a \begin{paracol}{2} which is hidden into the \begin{document} command. At a later stage in the document, you are required to issue a \end{paracol} (just before wide figures, for example, and before bibliography); see https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/606008/wide-table-using-mdpi-template/606032#606032. I am unable to produce a small example, but this thing for example disrupts the backward search from PDF in my vimtex.

But in general, my point is that this is often a smash-a-mole thing, similar things can appear everywhere and it is impossible to take into account all the times some package makes an utterly ugly thing like that.

Overleaf has a nice mechanism for this: everything between the two magic comments

%%begin novalidate
...
%%end novalidate

is completely ignored by code check, syntax highlight, etc.

Wouldn't that be a nice "last-resort" thing to have?

[lervag]

VimTeX has a similar feature for syntax highlighting, see :help vimtex-syntax:

There will probably always be situations where the parser will fail, and in
some cases it may be hard to "recover". It is therefore possible to manually
activate a severely reduced syntax zone to handle such situations. The zone is
activated with the directive `% VimTeX: SynIgnore on` and disabled with the
similar directive `% VimTeX: SynIgnore off`, e.g.: >

  % VimTeX: SynIgnore on
  \catcode`\$=11
  $
  \catcode`\$=3
  % VimTeX: SynIgnore off

The above LaTeX code will look plain, but OK with VimTeX. Note: The directive
is matched case insensitive, and the synonyms `enable` and `disable` may be
used instead of `on` and `off`.

It could be relevant to also support the same magic comment as Overleaf uses. Do you thank that is necessary?

Also: do you find a need for something in addition to this from VimTeX side?

[Rmano]

Ah, I did not know of that feature! Sorry for the noise.

[lervag]

No problem! The overleaf mechanism still looks nice to support from VimTeX as well? Afterall, it is quite easy to work locally towards Overleaf through the git integration...

[Rmano]

Yes --- that could be nice!

I work a lot locally with the overleaf-github link (so I can edit with vimtex locally, and still have online collaboration with my co-authors). Now I have the comments duplicated, but it would be nice if the overleaf comment would be understood by vimtex, too.

[lervag]

Done!

[Rmano]

Thanks!