X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t nil] ["3960" "Thu" "3" "December" "92" "15:36:14" "GMT" "David Carlisle" "carlisle@CS.MAN.AC.UK" nil "89" "structured comments (was: accents)" nil nil nil "12"]) Return-Path: Received: from sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE (serv01) by dagobert.ZIB-Berlin.DE (4.1/SMI-4.0/1.9.92 ) id AA11944; Thu, 3 Dec 92 16:44:08 +0100 Received: from vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de (vm.hd-net.uni-heidelberg.de) by sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE (4.0/SMI-4.0-sc/19.6.92) id AA27588; Thu, 3 Dec 92 16:44:04 +0100 Message-Id: <9212031544.AA27588@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de> Received: from DHDURZ1 by vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 0549; Thu, 03 Dec 92 16:44:41 CET Received: from DHDURZ1 by DHDURZ1 (Mailer R2.08 R208004) with BSMTP id 2436; Thu, 03 Dec 92 16:44:37 CET Received: from DHDURZ1 by DHDURZ1 (Mailer R2.08 R208004) with BSMTP id 2434; Thu, 03 Dec 92 16:44:34 CET Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project In-Reply-To: "J%org Knappen"'s message of Thu, 3 Dec 92 16:09:10 CET <25294.9212031510@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 3 Dec 92 15:36:14 GMT From: David Carlisle Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project To: Multiple Recipients of Subject: structured comments (was: accents) Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 887 >>>>> On Thu, 3 Dec 92 16:09:10 CET, "J%org Knappen" said: .... J%org> However, here is another idea which might be interesting, allthough I'm not J%org> sure if it may violate the principles of TeX: J%org> J%org> Use some kind of ``structured comment'' at the beginning of a .tex file. I J%org> have seen a thing like this on the Atari, where a line like J%org> %macropackage=lplain J%org> causes the implementation to choose the right format automatically. J%org> J%org> Here I'm thinking of of structured comment like J%org> %characterset=latin1 J%org> to cause the implementation automatically to choose the right character J%org> conversion table. J%org> J%org> Think this proposal needs some discussion, since the structured comments J%org> need standardisation to be really usefull. All my documents have (emacs generated) comments like your first example, which determine which format, and which previewer to use etc. so that I can use xdvi on simple documents and ghostview on ones with PS inserts. % Master File: xxx.tex % Document Previewer: xdvi % Document Type: laTeX This is fine, and it means that I never need to type anything to the unix command line. I think that it would be a very bad idea for the TeX implementation itself to read these comments. Apart from the fact that such a thing may not be allowed to be called TeX, I think that comments should *not* be read by the application (that's why they are called comments). Even the idea of embedding commands for a pre-processor within the comments of the main language has a lot of problems. Witness how many applications fail to correctly produce and/or parse the structured comments in PostScript files. A standard file header (like but not necessarily equal to) the one suggested by Nelson Beebe can contain information about formats and character sets in human readable form so that any necessary convertion utilities can be applied by hand. Smart editors like emacs may of course parse these headers and do it automatically, but I would not like to see this functionality added to TeX (or its successor). An example of a Beebe style header is: %%% ====================================================================== %%% @LaTeX-file{ %%% filename = "vol-task.tex", %%% version = "5.1", %%% date = "15 October 1992", %%% time = "07:58:32.41 CDT", %%% list-manager = "George D. Greenwade", %%% address = "Department of Economics and Business Analysis %%% College of Business Administration %%% P. O. Box 2118 %%% Sam Houston State University %%% Huntsville, Texas, USA 77341-2118", %%% email = "bed_gdg@SHSU.edu (Internet) %%% BED_GDG@SHSU (BITNET) %%% SHSU::BED_GDG (THENET)", %%% telephone = "(409) 294-1266", %%% FAX = "(409) 294-3712", %%% supported = "yes", %%% archived = "*Niord.SHSU.edu:[FILESERV.VOL-TASK], %%% pip.SHSU.edu:/vol-task.tex", %%% keywords = "LaTeX3, LaTeX, volunteer task list", %%% codetable = "ISO/ASCII", %%% checksum = "55231 955 4432 36808", %%% docstring = "This is general volunteer task list in the %%% development of LaTeX3. There are many tasks %%% needing to be done in support of the LaTeX3 [...... lots more documentation .....] %%% } %%% ====================================================================== It *may* be reasonable to switch character sets from within (a successor to) TeX, rather than from the command line, or having different sets built into different executables, but such extra functionality should *not* be a comment, rather it should be a new primitive \characterset= David