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Syntactic fontification uses a syntax table (see Syntax Tables) to
find and highlight syntactically relevant text. If enabled, it runs
prior to search-based fontification. The variable
font-lock-syntactic-face-function, documented below, determines
which syntactic constructs to highlight. There are several variables
that affect syntactic fontification; you should set them by means of
font-lock-defaults (see Font Lock Basics).
Whenever Font Lock mode performs syntactic fontification on a stretch
of text, it first calls the function specified by
syntax-propertize-function. Major modes can use this to apply
syntax-table text properties to override the buffer's syntax
table in special cases. See Syntax Properties.
If the value of this variable is non-
nil, Font Lock does not do syntactic fontification, only search-based fontification based onfont-lock-keywords. It is normally set by Font Lock mode based on the keywords-only element infont-lock-defaults.
This variable holds the syntax table to use for fontification of comments and strings. It is normally set by Font Lock mode based on the syntax-alist element in
font-lock-defaults. If this value isnil, syntactic fontification uses the buffer's syntax table (the value returned by the functionsyntax-table; see Syntax Table Functions).
If this variable is non-
nil, it should be a function to determine which face to use for a given syntactic element (a string or a comment). The value is normally set through an other-vars element infont-lock-defaults.The function is called with one argument, the parse state at point returned by
parse-partial-sexp, and should return a face. The default value returnsfont-lock-comment-facefor comments andfont-lock-string-facefor strings (see Faces for Font Lock).