Re: Inconsistent space after raw regions

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, Oct 05, 2015 at 02:27:33PM -0500, Quinn Grier wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 1:25 PM, Gavin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On 5 October 2015 at 17:23, Quinn Grier <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> There is inconsistent space inserted after the raw formatter regions.
> >> Try the following:
> >>
> >>       \input texinfo
> >>       @setfilename test.info
> >>       @settitle test
> >>       foo
> >>       @html
> >>       bar
> >>       @end html
> >>       @tex
> >>       bar
> >>       @end tex
> >>       baz
> >>       @bye
> >>
> >> This gives "foo barbaz" when translated to HTML but "foo bar baz" when
> >> translated to TeX with Texinfo 6.0, 5.2, and 4.13. It's unclear if this
> >> would be considered a bug, but it's something that I found surprising.
> >
> > Any thoughts which one is the best? I'd expect it to be more common
> > for the space to be wanted than unwanted.
> 
> I agree that ending a raw region would be expected to also act as word
> separating whitespace. If one did not want a space then the inline raw
> commands would be more natural, as you suggested.

Inline commands are more natural and were indeed added for that kind of
cases.  But prior from inline commands, the only way to add inline raw
text was with the block commands such as @html, and to leave the
possibility to have a space or not after the block, to allow for a sort
of inline command, the end of line at the end of the raw block was
removed.  Since it was not possible to do that with TeX, it was only
done with makeinfo.  I think that this feature was used by manuals to
workaround the lack of inline commands at that time.  (The end of line
before the block was never removed.)

I think that not removing the last end of line of raw blocks would
probably be better, but some manuals may expect the end of line to be
removed.  So, there is an issue of backward compatibility here.

-- 
Pat