Re: Bug?

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Mon, 29 Jul 1996, Steve Beisner wrote:

> I made a setup file based on "pdoc" with zero length @TopMargin
> and @BottomMargin.  The idea was to use "lout -p" to generate
> ASCII documents for E-mail without visible page breaks.
> 
> With zero top and bottom margins, I get an "illegal operation"
> exception from the OS.  After changing one of the margins back
> to a non-zero value it works fine.
> 
> Anybody else seen this, or is this just an artifact of my Win95
> version?

I tried this idea of getting continuous text from "lout -p" (an year
or so ago). I recall that sometimes things disappeared unexpectedly
from top and bottom of the page in some random fashion. I don't
remember the details right now. I looked through the remnants of those
experiments and found in setup file things like:

        .....
    @TopMargin { 0f }           # Make it continuous with "lout -p"
    @FootMargin { 0f }          # --//--
        .....
    @OddTop { @Null @Null }     # Hack alert!
    @EvenTop { @Null @Null }    # Hack alert!
        .....

Those funny headers are expected to provide an extra object to be
"eaten" by Lout in some unfavorable circumstances but which are
expected to have no visible effects otherwise. I viewed the result and
found an extra blank line in the place of the only page brake in that
small document. I recall that I was satisfied with results so I
conclude that the hack worked. (Yes, otherwise it "eats noisily" the
heading of the following section, I distinctly remember)

The problem is that galleys can bring *any* object to the page
boundaries and you usually can't predict what will happen the next
run. Your document may be broken when you insert a few lines of text
and a different object comes to the top of the page and interacts with
your zero width margins and null headers. BTW, Zero gaps are treated
slightly different by Lout: in tibetan text I can't set spacing to
zero as it is to be for Lout wont break lines; I have to workaround
and set spacing to 0.1p. Perhaps the problem is this zero gaps. Who
knows....

Best regards!

SY, Uwe.
--------
address@hidden                          |       Zu Grunde kommen
http://www.niif.spb.su/~uwe/            |       Ist zu Grunde gehen