Message-Id: <199312131614.AA27835@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Mon, 13 Dec 93 15:59:14 LCL
From: Mike Piff <M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: ideas for floats (forwarded)
Status: R


%>Figure environment and floats in particular currently behave in a way
%>that makes page design inconvenient. Programs like PageMaker look
%>attractive compared with LaTeX. Even stupid programs like MS-Word and
%>WordPerfect look attractive compared with LaTeX.


Clearly someone who **never** typesets mathematics...


%>
%>This should not be so. The LaTeX design COULD be better than all of
%>them. The features needed:
%>
%>  1. A figure option to place a figure on the current page directly
%>     after its citation. This implies that a figure citation exist which
%>     marks a page and a page location where the figure is to appear.
%>
%>  2. Item 1, but the figure goes in a particular place on the page: top,
%>     bottom, margin or here.
%>
%>  3. Failure algorithm. If the figure cannot be placed where it is
%>     desired, say page 10, then the page markup system creates page 10a,
%>     10b, 10c, etc, and dumps the troublesome figures onto these pages.
%>     This is easy to implement in LaTeX and an acceptable kind of
%>     failure resolution. Everyone consulted dislikes the mystery page of
%>     floats that appears later on God Knows Where (application of the
%>     float algorithm in LaTeX). Evidence: Lamport advises people NOT to
%>     report this "error".
%>


With respect, isn't this *exactly* what LaTeX does now? It does for me,
anyway!


Mike Piff


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% Dr M J Piff                            %%  e-mail:
%% School of Mathematics and Statistics   %%
%% University of Sheffield                %%  M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk
%% Hicks Building                         %%
%% SHEFFIELD S3 7RH                       %%  Telephone: (0742) 824431
%% England                                %%
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%