breakable markups

[Nicolas Sceaux]

Hi,

While thinking about an automatic way to build tables of contents (with
a few \header variables, a \table-of-contents command, et voilà), I
realized that an other problem needs to be solved first.  Indeed, if the
table of contents is too long for a single page, then it should be split
to fill several pages.  Hence the need of breakable markups.

A rough idea: a new set of breakable-markup commands, which would return
a list of stencils, instead of a single stencil.  For instance,
\breakable-justify would return a list of lines (iso a single stencil of
several text lines like \justify does).  Then, when interpreted, these
breakable markups would give several stencils, dealt individually by the
page layout functions (as if there would have been several toplevel
markups).

What do you think?

\breakable-markup \breakable-justify {
  La méthode que je donne, est une espèce de restitution que je fais au
  public, ayant profité autant qu'il m'a été possible des bons avis
  qu'on a bien voulu me donner sur mon art.
}

<==>

\markup { La méthode que je donne,  est une espèce de restitution que }
\markup { je fais au public,  ayant  profité  autant  qu'il  m'a  été }
\markup { possible des bons avis qu'on a bien voulu me donner sur mon }
\markup { art. }


A drawback may be that having many more lines to deal with would stress
the page breaking functions...

nicolas