lout-users
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Mark Summerfield's questions


From: Jeff Kingston
Subject: Mark Summerfield's questions
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 1999 09:11:52 +1000

My immediate suggestion is to switch from @Tab to the new package,
@Tbl.  It is more reliable in its handling of spanned columns.

But given the very fixed nature of the entries, it seems to me that
asking Lout to work out widths is not as good as deciding once and
for all how wide everything is going to be, as in

   PRODUCT_NAME 5c @Wide { product name }

etc.  Relying on Lout to scale over-wide lines is pretty risky,
its behaviour in those cases is relatively unpredictable.  Wouldn't
it be better to have Lout break into multi-line entries (as would
happen if you use @Wide) in long cases?

Also I recommend use of a definition such as

    def @CatalogueEntry
        named productname {}
        named suppliername {}
        ....

which you can spit out first.  That way, you can easily separate
playing around with the format from generating the data, making
it easier to change the format and decreasing the time it takes
to get it right.

If you do have specific problems you are goint to have to post
the specific input files that produce them, rather than a
general description of the problem.

Hope this helps.

Jeff Kingston


reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]