Message-Id: <199402091351.AA18862@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Wed, 9 Feb 1994 13:41:38 LCL
From: Mike Piff <M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Continuation lines
Status: R

From:          Anselm Lingnau <lingnau@MATH.UNI-FRANKFURT.DE>
%>
%>Joachim Schrod <schrod@ITI.INFORMATIK.TH-DARMSTADT.DE> writes:
%>
%>> It means use \@footline (or however it
%>> is called in LaTeX) to put your ////// sentence there.
                               (expletive deleted)

%>I believe that Mike wanted to know about the possibility of implementing
%>something without having to change LaTeX internals (the \output routine, as it
%>were). It turns out that it *is* possible, if nonobvious.

Well, I would regard the solution as changing the output routine, just as
much as changing \@outputpage is changing the output routine. One is changing
the way the output routine works whether one changes the internal \@outputpage
or the internal \@oddpagefooter or whatever.

Thus Joachim's solution---I have not tried it, so I cannot say whether
it works---is as bad as mine, in that it
(a) changes internal commands
(b) changes the behaviour of \output.
Hence all chances of achieving an essential function without hackery are
presumably lost. LaTeX, in pure and simple form, is incapable of handling
this simple task.

Moreover, there are presumably problems. In this instance, it is necessary
for the continuation lines to lie in the same text area as that occupied on
any other page, not in a region between the header/footer and the text area,
which is small anyway, as the text area is A4 minus a 2.54cm border. I easily
achieved this on the second page, because the \vsplit of the output routine
allows you to insert material in the main vertical list. This technique I
copied from The TeXbook, Ch23, p263.

I must admit that I fudged the first page of the split question for a while,
by allowing an extra line to be added to what were its former contents, and
assuming there was enough glue on the page to compensate. However,
occasionally it goes wrong this way, and the continuation line bumps right
down on top of the footer. (By the way, it is not enough just to remove the
last box from the first page and substitute the continuation line, as the
places where questions can be broken are *generally* pretty much constrained
by automatic insertion of penalties, and the carefully chosen breakpoint
would then be messed up by a displayed equation, say, being moved to the
following page.)  Last year I changed the format so that the continuation
line on the first page did, in fact, replace the Turn Over of the footer.

Fortunately, the default is to use a \filbreak between questions and a
\samepage within questions, so that questions are not split. Unfortunately,
this has the weird effect of moving a 1.5 page question that could have
started on page 5, say, onto page 6, then splitting it onto page 7, which is
wholly illogical from the end-user's point of view!

Mike Piff


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK.                    e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
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