Re: small point about punctuation

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thu, January 18, 1996 at 09:52:26 (+1000), Jeff Kingston wrote: ]
> Subject: small point about punctuation
>
> > BTW, w.r.t. changing the algorithm in Lout, it might also
> > help to ignore whitespace before a newline as a first step.
> 
> Lout already does this, at least, it is supposed to.

Hmm....  Yes indeed it does, and I also now see the statement in the
Expert's Guide (3.2) that says spaces and tabs that precede newlines are
indeed ignored.  As it happens, this is the same place where the
handling of multiple spaces between objects is discussed too.

[[ I finally had to print out the new documentation -- ghostview is just
too slow and cumbersome my my decrepit old Sun-3's for looking things up
in the index, etc.  What I really need is a postscript previewer that
can do hypertext jumps, and some way of sending hints from Lout to the
previewer for things like titles, index entries, and such.  Either that,
or an optional HTML output mode!  ;-) ]]

I think I meant to suggest though that Lout should ignore both leading
and trailing whitespace on input lines (or in effect treat any amount of
any kind of whitespace as if it were just one unit of whitespace),
except when reading verbatim or quoted text.

Lout does seem to ignore leading white space in some situations, but not
others.
 
For example the leading white space in this multi-line title isn't
ignored, though the whitespace before everything but the actual title
text is ignored:

        @Report

                @Title {
                        2.0f @Font {
                                A Proposal for System Administration
                                and Consulting Services
                        }
                }

This paragraph, if indented will end up with very large inter-word gaps
in between the words now separated by line breaks:

        @LP

                @Planix would like to propose
                the following services for system
                administration and maintenance of your
                @UNIX systems and wide area networks.

Yet the whitespace leading lines which call symbols, or others such as
those which set the value of various objects have no effect.  For
example, this def:

        def @CompanyFullName {
                @Planix | ", Inc."
        }

and this one:

        def @CompanyFullName { @Planix | ", Inc." }

result in the same output when @CompanyFullName is referenced.

It seems that whenever a '{' precedes text, any amount of whitespace may
also precede the text.

Now that I re-read the paragraph about spacing between objects, I don't
quite understand why it was done the way it is.  The current scheme does
guarantee that the input has fairly precise control over the output, but
this shouldn't really matter, as there are other ways of achieving the
same degree of control.

Except for the odd exception, Lout doesn't permit free-form input to as
great an extent as it could, or as TeX does for example.  I must admit
I'm not much of a Lout expert (yet), so I've been unable to determine if
this behavior is required for any other purpose.  In any event I would
much rather the formatted output be ideal for the desired final layout,
and not be dependent on any arbitrary style used in the input.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734                 VE3TCP                  robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>; Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>