From

Bill Page

Subject

[Axiom-developer]? RE: Line breaking and small font

Date

Fri, 31 Oct 2003 16:17:35 -0500

David,

At the present time the line-break code in tm_axiom makes assumptions about the font size (and type) and has a single parameter which specifies a maximum line length (now set at 4500, I think, which means 4.5 inches). When you change the font size used by OldTeXmacs to render the mathematics, tm_axiom does not know this. It might be possible to pass a command-line parameter to tm_axiom to set line length and font-scaling etc. I guess these numbers could be extracted from OldTeXmacs by the init-axiom.scm script but exactly how to do this is beyond my level of knowledge of OldTeXmacs at this time.

I think this complication supports the idea promoted by Joris that we should leave line-breaking to OldTeXmacs itself. But to do this, we might then be forced to make improvements to OldTeXmacs LaTeX conversion routines. That makes me think:

"Well, ok maybe, but Axiom is already a pretty big thing to take on, adding OldTeXmacs to the top of that makes it seem like too big a task for me right now ..."

Still, I do think OldTeXmacs has a great potential to achieve not only an excellent display of Axiom's mathematics within a full mathematical document preparation system, but also can go a long way towards providing the kind of literate programming tools that Tim has argued is important to Axiom's future. The extensions necessary to OldTeXmacs to make it handle the noweb-style pamphlet files and to provide a "tangle" operation to extract code etc. are (in principle) quite straight forward.

So I am still of two minds about this. But I am definitely leaning toward the idea of suggesting that Axiom adopt OldTeXmacs as it's primary user interface. In which case, investing the time necessary to help adapt OldTeXmacs for this purpose might be justified.

Cheers, Bill Page.

> -----Original Message-----:

 From: David Mentré [address@bogus.example.com">mailto:address@bogus.example.com 
 Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 3:51 PM
 To: Bill Page
 Cc: address@bogus.example.com
 Subject: Line breaking and small font

 Hello Bill,

 While testing your tm_axiom (1.0.2), I noticed that if I use 
 a small font in OldTeXmacs (Format->Size->Small) the line 
 breaking is done too early. In other words, the Axiom/OldTeXmacs 
 interface seems to not take into account the page size and 
 font size parameters. Any idea to solve that?

 Yours,
 david