Message-ID:  <199901281617.LAA17312@hilbert.math.albany.edu>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Thu, 28 Jan 1999 11:17:11 -0500
From: "William F. Hammond" <hammond@CSC.ALBANY.EDU>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      preamble declarations wanted
Status: R

Dear Friends --

Several ideas for LaTeX3 are listed below.  Inasmuch as I am not
familiar with TeX, the Program, I do not know what is realistic.

1.  "\noblankpars": In using a program to translate another markup to
LaTeX, if one wants to have a reasonable level of human readability in
the output, it would be desirable to be able to turn off the blank
line as a new-paragraph command and instead have a core latex command
"\strictpar" (not in any current package?) that would leave blank
spaces and newlines nearly completely interchangeable, as is the case,
for example, with many SGML declarations.  This feature would be
enabled with a preamble declaration such as "\noblankpars".
Otherwise, auto-generated lines (under difficult circumstances) could
be thousands of characters in length.  Inasmuch as I believe that the
blank line as a new-paragraph command under LaTeX is a pass-through to
"TeX", I do not know whether this could be done.

2.  "\commandend{;}":  LaTeX practice such as

                       "\LaTeX{} is great"

does not always leave quite the right space after the first word.
I would like to be able to use one of several characters such as
';' as a command name terminator in a document having in the
preamble the declaration "\commandend{;}".

3.  "\strictargoptsyntax":  In auto-generating lists, a programmer
either needs to check that the first character of item content is not
'[' or else routinely generate "\item[{}]", filling in the braces when
appropriate.  There are other similar examples that lead me to suggest
a preamble declaration "\strictargoptsyntax" which would have the
syntatic effect thereafter that any command with a sequence of
arguments and/or options of postive length must have no white space at
all between the command name and the first arg/opt or between
successive arg/opt's.  Of course, it would still be ok to use
something like:

\newcommand[2]{
     \proj
   }{
     \mbox{\textbf{P}^{#1}} ( #2 )
   }

where the user is trusted to use "\proj" only in math-mode.

                                   -- Bill