Re: some lout puzzles from comp.lang.functional

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Wed, Oct 06, 1999 at 11:13:16AM -0700, John Atwood wrote:

> Text flowing around figures. In TeX, a figure is the full width of the
> page (or column). I would like to have narrow figures take up only a
> fraction of the width and have text next to it. Non-rectangular
> figures would be nice as well, but are not essential.

I posted a simple solution recently.  It's two screens of sparse code.
Unfortunately it uses horizontal galleys and thus flowed text is not
hyphenated, since hyphenatation is done by builtin paragraph breaker.


> Better error-messages. If you forget to close a group, the LaTeX error
> message isn't very informative.

Both TeX and Lout could give good error messages in some situations
and bad in others.


> Better graphics. The picture environment in LaTeX is fairly limited. I
> know tehre are many packages around that improve on this, but it would
> be nice to have a standard package that effectively supports
> Postscript's graphical primitives.

@Diag is very powerful.  Now we need to bundle a distiller to be able
to use it with other backends (PDF).  Actually PS backend would
benefit from the falttener as well, as big @Diag can make your printer
choke.


> Locally scoped cross-references. In LaTeX labels are global. It would
> be nice to have labels that only extend to the current
> section/chapter/file/whatever. This way you don't have to worry about
> making globally unique labels.

It's not clear what a scope for xref is.  The point of xref is to be
global, I think.

SY, Uwe
-- 
address@hidden                         |       Zu Grunde kommen
http://www.ptc.spbu.ru/~uwe/            |       Ist zu Grunde gehen