[hlx] Re: new release

[Peter M. <pdm...@br...>]

<tomfool> wrote 2004-11-11 17:28:

>  There"s a release version 2.8 on hyperlatex.sourceforge.net.   Enjoy.
>
>  The release notes are a bit underwhelming: "creates better HTML".
>  But it is a significant addition, if only in effort.

Thank you! I'm about to update (from 2.6). However:

>  The paragraph
>  generation is more rational now, Hyperlatex now generates the closing
>  tags for <p> and <li> HTML, and I"ve gotten rid of a persistent bug
>  where <p> tags were often omitted following a section or environment.
>  I don"t have a very sophisticated test suite, so I could use feedback
>  about what I screwed up if you do it in gentle tones.

It seems that labels between paragraphs (always?) give rise to extra 
blank lines.

For example, browse the "About the Html output" section of the online 
manual <http://hyperlatex.sourceforge.net/html/hyperlatex_3.html>: I 
see extra blank lines after the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th paragraphs (using 
Firefox, Safari, or IE on Mac OS X).

Here's a snippet from the source:

   the <em>Next</em> button always leads to the next piece of
   text.)</p>
   <a name="topnode">&nbsp;</a>
   <p>If you look at  this manual, you'll find

Reversing the order of </p> and the anchor avoids the extra blank line. 
Would it be easy to do that automatically when generating the html?

The above is probably just a symptom of the underlying problem already 
pointed out in the manual: the lack of an explicit point of attachment 
for anchors generated by label commands. (Using the Label environment 
solves the problem, albeit a bit clumsily; if that is the recommended 
solution, all the uses of \label in the manual should be eliminated...)

There's another glitch, which I noticed when browsing 
"Cross-references" in the online manual 
<http://hyperlatex.sourceforge.net/html/hyperlatex_33.html>:

      file\texonly{---see Section~\Ref}.
   </pre>
   <a name="id2">  Note</a> that when you use LaTeX's <code>\ref</code> 
command,
   <p>the label does not mark a <em>position</em> in the document, but a

That <p> comes in a very strange place - and of course causes an 
unintended blank line.

Maybe further browsing of the online manual will reveal further 
superfluous blank lines due to labels (e.g., after section headings).

I hope that these things are easy to fix; sorry that I don't have time 
or expertise to help myself.

Finally, a suggestion for a future version:

Wouldn't it be better if a tilde in the URL argument of \xlink were to 
be interpreted literally - and thus consistently with \url and \href 
arguments in latex?  I can't imagine anyone actually wanting tildes to 
be interpreted as nbsps in URLs... Moreover, one currently has to 
remember to convert tildes to "\~{}" when pasting URLs into documents, 
which is a frequent source of bugs (for me, at least).

-- Peter

P.S. I've just subscribed to the list.

Peter D. Mosses <pdm...@br...> <http://www.brics.dk/~pdm>
BRICS & Department of Computer Science,   University of Aarhus
Aabogade 34 [office: Turing 126],   DK-8200 Aarhus N,  Denmark
Phone: +45 8942 5785, Secr.: +45 8942 5600, Fax: +45 8942 5601
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 From 1 January 2005:
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