Re: Why does -dbackend=svg -dcrop remove system-system-spacing?

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> Oh, sorry, I thought it was obvious.  I vote against adding a new
>> argument to `-dcrop`.
> 
> Why? The description quoted shows that an argumant is optional.

My objection is by principle.  Backward compatibility doesn't make
sense to me for situations that are (a) completely buggy, and (b)
which can already be circumvented by other means.

> But why would you want to prevent anybody using the current
> behaviour, should they so desire, by writing "-dcrop 0"? 

Because the natural extension of `-dcrop` is to specify margin values!
For example,

  -dcrop 3

could mean that there should be a 3mm whitespace border on all sides.

As far as I can see there isn't a big difference between changing your
suggested `-dcrop` to `-dcrop 0` on the command line and putting

  \paper { system-system-spacing.basic-distance = #0 }

into a file that gets added to the command line before the actual
input.  In both cases you have to change something, and in both cases
it can be easily done on the command line (for most use cases) without
changing the document.  If necessary, the above line can be added to
the document, which shouldn't be too much a burden either.

> It's quite usual to allow people to access previous behaviour when
> revising software.

Not for such fundamental flaws IMHO.


    Werner