Re: pagenumbers and the -s (no cross references) option

[kahl]

 > 
 > To get a quick overview on the layout(book), I compile
 > the document with -s. For the final layout, I compile
 > with -r5 or similar, which is very handy.
 > But the layout in both cases is diffrent:
 > 
 > With the -s option, I get ?? instead of pagenumbers.
 > OK, but although I have
 > 
 > @IntroOddFoot        { @Centre @PageNum      }
 > @IntroEvenFoot       { @Centre @PageNum      }
 > 
 > in the setup-file the "??" are written to the top of the page and
 > they seem to take up a little bit more space, because the last line
 > of every page is then written to the next page.
 > (Additionally I get ?? on @OnTitelPage, where normally no
 > Pagenumbers show up, but thats no real problem)

This is another instance of the problem that I observed long ago:
The fact that unresolved (or, more general, un-finalised) cross-references
can take up more space than their finalised version
breaks space-monotonicity,
and therefore (at least) delays convergence to the fixed-point.

At the time I proposed to replace "??" with "_"
(and even submitted a patch) ---
this solved the problem for me
(a talk full of full slides previously took O(number of slides) runes),
but was rejected by Jeff --- if I recall correctly,
for ``user-friendliness'' reasons.

Since Lout is otherwise a relatively principled affair,
one should give this another try ---
perhaps at least use very small, bold "??",
so that in most cases they end up being not larger than the final thing.

For George's problem, they would actually have to have the SAME height,
wich may be easy for the default formats, but hard in general.


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