Message-Id: <199312160957.AA04102@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Wed, 15 Dec 93 21:02:12 CET
From: Gabriel Valiente Feruglio <valiente@IPC4.UIB.ES>
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

Dear Philip Taylor,

ever since I had some trouble with composing large trees with TreeTeX I want
to comment with you on the following, both in the context of TeX and of the
NTS. The subject is (lack of) modularity in TeX. Suppose you have already
composed a complex stuff. Now wouldn't it be desirable to be able to save the
CONTENTS of a box holding that stuff, that is, the box fully expanded, to a
file in order to just include it afterwards, instead of having to compose it
over and over again, here and there, in any document using it? I was trying
to do something like that but it seems that TeX doesn't support such an export
of the contents of a box other than to the DVI file, which is in principle a
little difficult to parse by TeX because of being a binary file. Am I wrong in
saying that?

The precise motivation was the TreeTeX macros needing much resources in order
to typeset a large (over 50 nodes) tree, and the only way around it was to
use the smallest format (plain). But then I need to somehow include the
composed trees in an AMS-LaTeX document, which is too large a format file to
typeset such large trees. I even need to include the trees as objects in
commutative diagrams, and there are text labels for nodes and arcs, so that
drawing the trees with any (interactive) drawing program doesn't seem to be a
good solution.

Do you see any way of doing that with TeX? Does all this raise any interesting
question for the NTS project?

Thank you very much. Yours,

Gabriel
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Gabriel Valiente Feruglio                            Telefon +3471 172967
Mathematics and Computer Science Department          Telefax +3471 173003
University of the Balearic Islands
E-07071 Palma (Balears) Spain              Internet: valiente@ipc4.uib.es
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