Re: About itemize

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 10:31 PM 11/11/2002 +0100, you wrote:

>Monday, November 11, 2002 Idris S Hamid wrote:
>
>ISH> Dear posse,
>
>ISH> The itemize environment has  a strange feature/bug:
>
>(This should answer your "quotation" question too, at least
>partly)
>
>All "blocks" have this bug; IIRC it comes from Hans preference of
>spacey "readable" sources; this means all \par tokens after a
>\stop are globbed, and (IIRC) a new paragraph is always started:
>thus the indentnext option *always* take place. IOW, you cannot
>have one of these blocks *within* a paragraph.
>
>Hans, am I right?
>
>Well, if I am, this is absolutely wrong. Presence or absence of
>\pars before and after should not be ignored, or at least should
>be made an option. My workaround for now is to use \nulls after
>\stop... commands, but this is somewhat clunky.

first of all, we're not dealing with a bug, it's a feature; so, if some 
other behavior is wanted, it should be an option of extension to existing 
mechanisms, nog a replacement.

there is one thing we should keep in mind: naive users are not always aware 
of tex's empty line == par, so this is why \start/\stop things are 
consistent in absense or presense of them;

distinguishing between display and semi-display is therefore not that 
trivial, and the best option is separate environments, like

   \startquotation ... \stopquotation

(or \startdquotation ... \stopdquotation for display quotation) versus

   \startpquotation ... \stoppquotation

for an in-paragraph one (like we have with formulas, see core-mat.tex)

that way, one knows what to expect, since it's clear from the coding, and 
not from a (forgotten, or accidental) empty line

another option is to have a dedidated environment

\startinparagraph ... \stopinparagraph

or \startcontinue ... \stopcontinue

which nills the surrounding whitespace and inhibits the next indent. (this 
should be not that hard to implement)

Hans


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