[hlx] Suggestion for a few changes

[Ryszard K. <ry...@bi...>]

Hello All,

I've just installed version 2.8 of HyperLatex. It was an upgrade
from version 2.5 and I had to reconfigure my previous settings
so that my documents generated the same output as before. In that
process I encountered a few difficulties so I'm coming with a few
suggestions.

1. I think it would be nice to have a variable like:

   (defvar hyperlatex-xml-charset "UTF-8"
     "The name of character encoding for an entire XML document")

so that a user may override the UTF-8 encoding which is now
hard-wired in the code.

2. There is a bug around line 1850 of hyperlatex.el. The following
cannot work properly in Emacs since - is a meta-character in regular
expressions:

   (string-match "^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_-.:]+$" label)

A consequence of the error is that HyperLatex converts too many
labels to a form idN which in many cases is not what we want.
A patch might look like:

   (string-match "^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9\-\_\.\:]*$" label)

Note that _ has moved to a second posiiton, after \-, because of
another bug, in Emacs this time. Should _ (no matter whether
escaped or not) stay at the first position after 9 Emacs
would fail to string-match labels like "k_node".

3. I've just noticed that a \label command generates some output.
I very much believe that it should should not! For example,
\label{id4} generates <a name="id4">&nbsp;</a> while
<a name="id4"></a> should suffice. At least it does with
FireFox while the spurious &nbsp; badly pollutes layout.

Best Regards
Rysiek