The Thanh Han wrote:
Hi,
currently a character node in tex has the only attribute, ie the associated font. I m wondering whether it makes sense to replace this attribute (font) by a pointer to some data structure representing a set of attributes. This way we can add further attributes of a character without messing up around the sources. Such attributes can be: font, color, location in tex sources, next bytes of a utf8 sequence etc. How to you guys see it?
this is indeed a much wanted feature although i don't know what you mean with utf 8 here since at the char node that has already been reslvbed of course it needs some thinking because it should be easy to combine existing functionality with user built stuff; also, additional features would be needed in order to handle resources at page boundaries and such (comparable to marks ) ; fonts probably are hard coded features then how do you envision this? Say that \newfeature \mycolor defines an abstract feature. At a certain point tex needs to let a macro package handle the features, i.e. pass all relevant features to a handler; \handlefeature (gets called as many times as needed with \feature set) this could be something direct or delayed (it depends on how it will influence par building and page breaking etc; for instance one may now want specials/literals to end up too soon in the process; i can even imagine that all features are delayed till shipout time; we need to distinguish between begin and end situations (maybe even at the level of lines, paragraphs, pages, splits ... it's not that easy to come up with a good generic approach to some extend marks are ok to handle features, but they lack some functionality (like a proper way to reset the internal mark register); and they also can interfere [taco and i had some discussion on this but i don't think we ever wrote down something ...] Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------