Re: various problems reported by David Kuehling

[Jeff Kingston]

I guess David has found lots of problems, and for the most
part he's found workarounds for them.  I'm just going to
try to explain (not excuse) what has been happening.

> Unfortunately Lout seems unable to handle page sizes much greater than
> A3.

Lout uses 32-bit integers to represent the sizes of things; one
cm is represented by the number 567 (one point is 20).  There
is also a short length used for the gaps between things, and
other distances expected to be short (e.g. character metrics).
It ought to be ample.  I should look into this and perhaps get
rid of all short lengths.  No-one cares about memory any more.


> Seems like Lout broke the lines twice
> First just
normally, and then a second time to break lines that were still too
long.

Yep, this will happen if there are two @Wide symbols giving
conflicting information about how much space there is.  Not
pretty but then it doesn't often happen either.

> Even if I change this to 50c @Wide @Scale..., the output looks excactly
> the same, and Lout does not output any kind of error or warning.

Presumably you don't have those 50c, and Lout is cutting them back
to something smaller.  It doesn't given a warning when it does
that.  It would be nice if it did, but there are cases where it
is the natural thing to do, and then the warnings look funny, so
I took them out.

> @CD 12c @Wide @Scale @IncludeGraphic{ "plots/cca-schema2.eps" }

With a display, you make everything a lot harder for Lout behind
the scenes.  On its first attempt it allocates no space at all,
so later on when the display arrives and tries to squeeze in,
it's going to be hard to fit it in.

As for general advice, I would say that the fastest way to
get exactly what you want in these circumstances is to
enclose every paragraph of text in a @Wide symbol, and make
sure that everything adds up to something that will fit.
If you are plagued by tiny roundoff errors in the width
calculations, try numbers like 14.9c instead of 15c etc.
to make sure that things fit.  And influence Lout by
making things that are too wide smaller, rather than
things that are too narrow wider.  There are tools
around that will post-process PostScript, e.g. scale it
up, so if overflow is still bothering you, do everything
on a smaller scale and use one of the tools later to
scale up to the size you want.

Jeff Kingston