Re: [hlx] Paragraphs in version 2.9

[tom s. <to...@as...>]

Ryszard Kubiak <ry...@bi...> wrote:

> 9. I don't believe that a single global variable
> hyperlatex-in-paragraph may correctly describe
> whether we process a paragraph and which one.
> The structure od LaTeX documents is recursive
> by nature so recursion must be involved
> in paragraph recognition. May be continuations
> would be appropriate for the purpose...

Yes, this is essentially correct, though I'd certainly wait to hear from
you how to use continuations to solve it.  

The hyperlatex-in-paragraph flag I introduced is not, however, the only
conditional flag in the code that controls paragraph placement.  But the
real problem is that the hyperlatex parser design and HTML semantics are
fundamentally different than the TeX parser design and LaTeX semantics.
Mostly they match up ok, but where they don't is where the problems
lie, even though the differences are slight.

My inaction on the <p> bug is born partly of some practical personal
circumstances, but mostly it's because I am genuinely uncertain of what
the best way to approach the issue is.  The uncertainty is made more
acute for two reasons.  One is that there is a wide variety of browsers
out there and they all seem to differ about what is good html.  And the
second is that none of the obvious (to me) solutions seem to work well,
and I hesitate to commit what may become a huge amount of time to
developing an ineffective kluge.

One approach to fix these issues is to delve a bit deeper and figure out
another more subtle condition to check for to deal with list paragraphs,
and I am open to suggestions (and I thank Ryszard for the ones he's
offered so far).  Another approach is to modify the parser to be more
like TeX's parser, with a mouth to chew characters, a gullet to swallow
tokens and a stomach to digest arguments.  This seems to me to have the
best chance of being able to tell the difference between macros that
don't print anything and the start of new paragraphs, for example.  But
this is a substantial job.  I'd also like to change the way Hyperlatex
writes its output right into the same buffer as it's getting its input.
This makes the second pass pretty confusing, requires that a substantial
number of macros are interpreted twice in exactly the same way, which
seems inefficient, and requires protecting characters in such a way that
dealing with alternate character sets in a robust way is difficult.  But
this is also a substantial task, and there may be design issues I don't
know about that dictated this choice in the first place.

So that's sort of the situation right now.  Comments welcome, advice
welcome. 

Thanks,

 -tom

-- 
 ------------------------
 tomfool at as220 dot org
 http://sgouros.com  
 http://whatcheer.net