@Doc considered harmful (Re: How to with latin2)

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Thu, Jul 19, 2001 at 16:00:30 +0200, Radek Hnilica wrote:

> I am totally lost, I was trying this:
> -----------------> cut here <----------------
> @SysInclude { latin2 }
> @SysInclude { doc }
> 
> @Doc @Text @Begin
>   @InitialLanguage { Czech }
>   @InitialFont { TimesCE Base 11p }

*sigh* - this just reaffirms my opinion that the @Doc alias was a bad
idea.  Newcomers are being tricked by it all the time.

@Doc is just a (in)convenience alias for 

    @Document
    //

All those options are options to the @Document symbol, so you should
write:

    @Document
      @InitialLanguage { Czech }
      @InitialFont { TimesCE Base 11p }
    //
    @Text @Begin

This is of course documented in the User's Guide, but the amount of
(pedagogical) troubles @Doc causes on the ongoing basis for newbies
far outweights the small gain in terseness, IMO.

@Doc hides the (in)famouse // between the layout symbol invocation
(@Document, @Report, @Book etc) and the body of the document.

Since there are no similar aliases for other layouts, people that
start using those more elaborate layouts don't have the habit of using
// since they were using @Doc.

Also when people want to use options to @Document they also need to
learn that @Doc should be expanded into @Document // and that options
comes in between.

IOW, @Doc considered harmful.


> But the output is:
> English Czech  Times Base 12p TimesCE Base 11p

In your case those @Initial* symbols were not parameters, but ordinary
symbols in the text of the document, so they were expanded to their
unchanged defautl values "English" and "Times Base 12p" and what you
thought were values of those parameters - "Czech" and "TimesCE Base
11p" were also inserted literally

Hope this helps.

SY, Uwe
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