Re: mkiv

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2007, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Currently most mails on the list about mkiv and luatex concern
> installation and fonts. This is ok since quite some code is related to
> that. The next couple of months other (sub)systems will be activated (or
> discovered by users since quite some stuff is already there).

This is great.

> - sectioning and list handling, needs some rework for mkii too

There needs to be better support for section separators. Right now, 
section separators work for section heads, but modifying separtors for 
referencing sections is very ugly. Here is what IEEE publications 
want, which is hard to do right now:

While placing section heads, do not use parent number. So sections are 
I, II, III, etc., subsections are A, B, C, etc., subsubsections are 
\alpha), \beta), etc. But when you are referencing sections, you need 
to have sepators. So a subsection needs to be referred to as 
I-B.\gamma. Right now, there is no easy way to do this.

>
> - debugging and error handling: there (try \showdebuginfo \page or maybe
> \overloaderror \crap); we need a way to refresh browser windows
> automatically

This is wonderful. Is the error format configurable? Do you plan to 
support something other than XML output? HTML display of errors is 
great, but for my workflow, I want something tightly integrated with 
the editor. Vim allows that, provided I can write rules which tell vim 
how tex errors look. Currently, it is really hard to write something 
that captures all the tex errors. Hopefully, writing something for an 
xml error will be easy. But if it is possible, the easiest will be "C" 
compiler type errors: "Error on line xx of file yy:" With the 
errortype-c (or something like that) flag to pdftex, for some errors 
yo get this, but for others you do not (File ended while scanning 
\startbuffer, etc).
>
> maybe we should set up a wiki page where users can make a wishlist for
> fundamental features cq. exploring features under construction
>
My other set of requests is about two column design. The 
\startcolumns ... \stopcolumns works, but does not support footnotes 
on each column. With columnsets (with a bit of tweaking) you can get 
two column footnotes, but columsets do not seem to like the rest of my 
setup (equation run over the top and bottom marins). I have never 
managed to nail it down precisely.

And then there are floats. topfloats should be always below a chapter 
or a title, and checking indentation after top and bottom floats.

Let me know when you get to columns and floats, and I can provide some 
details, and so some testing.

Aditya

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