[Po4a-devel]Call for a (La)TeX module

[Nicolas François]

Hello,

On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 08:46:53PM +0100, Martin Quinson wrote:
> this is a very decent start, please commit it. Just rename it to LaTeX.pm
> before. The case is important, and Latex is different.

Do you rather TeX or LaTeX?

> You have a strange if (0) somewhere, and docheader is still from the man
> module.

Removed and fixed.

> % is the comment sign, but it can be escaped and \% produce a percent sign.
> \\\% produce a line break (meaning of \\) and then a percent sign.

Any drawback in converting \\ to \newline?
(It will simplify the handling of commands and comments because I won't
need to test for an even or odd number of backslashes)

> In tex, spaces at the begining of the line are not meanfull. So 
> "toto%
>    toto"
> is equivalent to "totototo".
> 
> nonbreaking space in latex is ~, just in case you want to populate the
> pre/post translation.

My (La)?TeX is quite rusty;)

> Please do die on commands you don't know.

Is there a way to make die not dying?
At this time I found printf easier for testing because it permits to test
a whole file.
But anyway, it now works a little and I will just die for the commit;)

> That's all I've seen sofar. I didn't see any Python specificity. Could you
> point me to some examples?

Maybe \index

Maybe also the way I'm treating \index when they are at the beginning or
the end of a paragraph.

Otherwise, there are some \begin{productionlist}, \production{...}{...}
\productioncont{...}, \begin{tableiii} \lineiii etc. (They are not
supported yet)

> For more information, search the net for "JoliManuelPourLaTeX.ps". It's in
> french, obviously. It's becoming a bit old and the discution about modules
> is not very accurate anymore, but it's a rather good introduction. 
>
> You have an info file I use rather often as a reference in the package
> tetex-bin: "info latex". Maybe not sufficient as an introduction, and does
> cover tex at all ("info tex" is a pitfall speaking of texinfo).

Thanks! I definitely need these pointers.

> Could you please include what you didn't implement yet from my proposals as
> comment? Verbatim if you don't want to bother too much.

I will reply to your previous mail for this point.


To support texinfo, I will need to support commands not starting by a \
but an @.


Some TeX questions:
 * Does a line starting by a command has a special meaning when inside a
   paragraph?

For example, I've seen:
Who
{}\code{are}
you?

but also:
Who
\code{are}
you?

   Are those paragraphs different?

 * Is there any problem if a space is added at the end of lines?

 * Any idea on how to test the results? (diffing dvi?)


-- 
Nekral