[Axiom-developer] RE: Line breaking and small font

[Bill Page]

David,

At the present time the line-break code in tm_axiom
makes assumptions about the font size (and type) and
has a single parameter which specifies a maximum line
length (now set at 4500, I think, which means 4.5 inches).
When you change the font size used by TeXmacs to render
the mathematics, tm_axiom does not know this. It might
be possible to pass a command-line parameter to tm_axiom
to set line length and font-scaling etc. I guess these
numbers could be extracted from TeXmacs by the init-axiom.scm
script but exactly how to do this is beyond my level of
knowledge of TeXmacs at this time.

I think this complication supports the idea promoted by
Joris that we should leave line-breaking to TeXmacs itself.
But to do this, we might then be forced to make improvements
to TeXmacs LaTeX conversion routines. That makes me think:

"Well, ok maybe, but Axiom is already a pretty big thing to
take on, adding TeXmacs to the top of that makes it seem like
too big a task for me right now ..."

Still, I do think TeXmacs has a great potential to achieve
not only an excellent display of Axiom's mathematics within a
full mathematical document preparation system, but also can go
a long way towards providing the kind of literate programming
tools that Tim has argued is important to Axiom's future. The
extensions necessary to TeXmacs to make it handle the noweb-style
pamphlet files and to provide a "tangle" operation to extract
code etc. are (in principle) quite straight forward.

So I am still of two minds about this. But I am definitely
leaning toward the idea of suggesting that Axiom adopt TeXmacs
as it's primary user interface. In which case, investing the
time necessary to help adapt TeXmacs for this purpose might
be justified.

Cheers,
Bill Page.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Mentré [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 3:51 PM
> To: Bill Page
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: Line breaking and small font
> 
> 
> Hello Bill,
> 
> While testing your tm_axiom (1.0.2), I noticed that if I use 
> a small font in TeXmacs (Format->Size->Small) the line 
> breaking is done too early. In other words, the Axiom/TeXmacs 
> interface seems to not take into account the page size and 
> font size parameters. Any idea to solve that?
> 
> Yours,
> david
> 
> PS: You have probably noticed that I re-submited to texmacs-dev
> your tm_axiom against latest TeXmacs (1.0.2.4), taking into 
> account axiom renaming (AXIOMsys).
> -- 
> David MENTRE <address@hidden> -- http://www.nongnu.org/axiom/
>