Re: What is wrong with using \begin{flushleft}?

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Aug 06, 2022 at 06:19:07PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> In the comments in LaTeX.pm it says that the flushleft environment
> in LaTeX does not match Texinfo because of a difference in "filling",
> but I did not understand what the difference was or which Texinfo
> command this referred to.

It refers to @flushleft and @flushright Texinfo commands.
In @flushleft and @flushright Texinfo commands, the text is not
filled, line endings in the input correspond to line breaks in the
output.  In LaTeX \begin{flushright} and \begin{flushleft} environments,
the end of line in the input have no effects on the output, the text is
filled.

> For @raggedright, the main difference between the texinfo.tex output
> and the current LaTeX output with flushleft is that in LaTeX, there
> is no hyphenation inside the block, but apart from this they seem
> the same and the output is acceptible.

Indeed, @raggedright in Texinfo is filled, aligned on the left, but on
the right, this is the same for LaTeX \begin{flushleft}.  @raggedright
is actually implemented as \begin{flushleft}:

my %LaTeX_environment_commands = (
  'raggedright' => ['flushleft'],
..
);

> For @display and @format, which aren't filled, flushleft isn't being
> used anyway, so there is no problem here.