[Texmacs-dev] weaktab patch

[david]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 05:53:17PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> 1001: Discuss
>   The idea behind this patch is not bad, but things start to
>   become to hacky. I think that we should try to conceive
>   a cleaner scheme along similar lines. Maybe tabs should
>   take an optional addional argument 'last', 'all' (default)
>   or 'first'. So we have an argument 'minimal space',
>   an argument 'part' and the optional extra argument.
> 
>   The idea is that in a paragraph with a list of tabs,
>   all tabs with 'last' (resp. 'first') as optional argument
>   are considered together and the 'part' argument is set
>   to '0' except for the last (resp. first) tab. The current
>   special treatment for tabs with part=0 is suppressed.

I do not think that would be right.

There is really a need for 'hflush' to be weak compared to regular
tabs. With the scheme you propose, hflush would interact with regular
tabs on the same line, preventing the user to flush some text to
right at the end of a theorem or list.

The story behind weaktab is that in some macros, hflush is used for
centering instead of paragraph style, but no one knows the real
reason. Unless the problem which caused this hack to be used is known,
no good clean solution can be devised.

This patch provides an implementation which is backwards compatible,
and once one admits that 'weak tabs' (currently, hflush only) are
needed for centering, it is as clean as can be.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
   address@hidden  |    address@hidden
TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.