World: r3wp

oldes: i have an utf8 parser too. however it's not that easy because 
the PDF format does not support unicode directly. you have to create 
custom fonts. i have to study this in detail, but i noticed that 
OpenOffice generates a font for each set of 256 characters.

graham: for footers with the current chapter/section etc. i'm going 
to do the same as TeX (should be rather easy to implement). i have 
to think how to resolve them and page numbers into text though, but 
in simple cases it's quite easy to do (the more general case will 
need some thinking)

at worst we'll do like LaTeX and use n passes to resolve page number 
references.

How about this for an idea: you allocate space for each page reference 
as if it's the largest likely page, eg 9999. As each page reference 
is resolved, you get some space back, but that reclaimed space becomes 
"dead" whitespace (probably placed at the end of the page, or distributed 
amongst other whitespace), and it does not cause an earlier  page-break. 
So the page reference resolution will not affect the pagination.

but then you're no more getting an optimal solution. :)

my plan is to eventually add a "simple" text mode for use when you 
care for speed instead of quality.

That's true....

So an application would operate in simple" mode most of the time, 
but final render would use the expensive algorithm that requires 
n passes.

yes... if you're typesetting a book, you'll want the quality; if 
you're typesetting an invoice, you won't care about justification 
with the total-fit algorithm (although, the total-fit algorithm could 
still help to break pages when there are tables)

An invoice usually wouldn't be more than one or two pages ! :)

OTOH it would be highly practical with custom fonts, such as OCR 
fonts for invoices. also tables are very useful.

Any chance of being able to create pdf forms ?

not on my list. maybe in the future.

so... noone willing to write the user docs?

anyway - i have a question. do you think that it would be useful 
to have tabs, as fixed positions inside lines to go to with a tab 
command in the middle of a paragraph?

i think that all cases where this could be useful can be solved with 
tables.

can you explain further on tabs?

eg you set tabs to [30 60 90] then when you write:

some text
 tab "some other text"

some other text

 will start at the next tab position (30 mm from the margin, 60 mm 
 from the margin etc, depending on where "some text" ends out)

btw, new update fixing a bug

I think tabs will be good when importing text from a script's console 
output, for instance.

tabs are good.

I'd really like to do the docs, but I'm so overloaded.

detab the script source first ;)

i know that tabs are good - i wonder if they are needed.

They're good because they're needed aren't they ? ;-)

I have not read through the whole thread.


But, there is mention of space and page break. What is the issue 
now?

Is it because of 'unexpected' page break?

anton, if you can convince me they are needed (i.e. there are things 
that are useful to do that can't be done without them) :)

otherwise, i'll end up with an infinite list of things to add.

How did you implement the leading indent at the beginning of paragraphs 
? Is that not in reality a kind of tab ?

Excuse me if I sound a bit disconnected. I do not clearly envisage 
yet how it should be used.

that is a fixed space, not a tab.

Mmm.. I can't think of any particular need for tabs off the top of 
my head, but I remember a situation a long time ago where I was editing 
text, tabs were not implemented and I missed them. I'm sorry I can't 
be more specific than that at the moment.

Just tabs are a quick and handy alternative to setting up a table.

does anyone think there are good reasons to support variable widths 
when breaking a table between pages?

this would also mean that the table's columns need to have a different 
width across pages. ie column 1 in page 1 has a different width from 
column 1 in page 2.

Nope.

I think that could be useful. As tables get longer (and need to be 
broken across pages) it becomes more probable that it has data with 
a very wide range of widths. In that case, reproportioning the table 
for each page makes sense. But perhaps when crowding between cells 
occurs because of very wide entries, simply wrapping text within 
cells would allow the column width to remain the same for the whole 
table.

On the whole, I would prefer to have consistent column widths, but 
there might be cases where that's really annoying. I would probably 
put that as a lower priority feature for now.

how would you expect vertical alignment to be handled when a cell 
gets split into two for page breaking?

Mmm.... that depends on the whim of the user. Splitting some types 
of data might be misleading.

Would you indicate that the table is split for a page break (by not 
drawing the bottom line of the table on the first page, and not drawing 
the top line on the second page etc.)

?

that's a different issue.

a data table like the one you're thinking about most likely has one 
line of text for each row. that would be split at row boundaries 
only.

Yes, but I think it's connected because it allows one to be more 
aware that the cell might have been split.

i was thinking initially to allow two modes of splitting cells: cut 
and split.

cut would work like the cell was just cut with scissors.

I think it's safer to keep each row together with itself by default.

split would instead create two cells from the original one.