Re: Thanks, and more questions

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 21:25:50 -0400, Dmitry Kirsanov wrote:

> 1. The idea of Lout placing the row mark at the middle of lowercase
> letters, instead of the baseline, strikes me as something rather weird.

See the very bottom of 'whatsnew' file in the distribution.
That entry is there for couple of years now. :-(


> 2. I need outdented paragraphs, but to my great surprise I could not
> find any way to change the value of the outdent.

Yes, it's hardwired (in z14.c:FillObject)


> Is there a way to get BOTH arbitrary outdent value and hyphenation?

Hmm, I thought I was clever and wrote:

    1f @ZUnit
    outdent @Break 1i @Font { & 1z @Font { 
    Blah blah blah...
    ....
    }}

But while this gives 2i outdent, it also uses hyphenation sign at 1i
font size.  Gaa!

Adding outdent amount to break style is not very difficult
techncially, I guess, but "unstrucured" left parameter to @Break is
already so overloaded that this might (must?) trigger a syntax change.

At a casual glance I think the wrong font size for hyphen could be
fixed in FillObject by inheriting style for it from a different
object, but that's just the first impression, I haven't tried.


> 3. Finally: is there a way to implement hanging punctiation in Lout? 

At the user level - no (you can't tell if you're at the end of the
line).  At the core level - I don't think it's hard.  But all this
requires exporting to the user world a lot of knobs to the paragraph
breaker and coming up with a consistent syntax for it etc.

I think nobody so far was really pushing the envelope and so status
quo have been "good enough".

SY, Uwe
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