TeX, LaTeX and Friends

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\hsize10.25cm
\raggedright
\parindent0pt


The trick is to let the system find the line breaks such that the expected letter starts each line.
It is much easier if the source is XML. This main text is more or less relevant to the subject
raised in the question. This text is far more interesting than boring Lipsum that you see in
so many other answers on this site. You may find a distinct lack of TikZ in this answer,
booktabs doesn't show up and nor does Lua. You will note how no special markup is needed:

...if compiled under pdflatex.

David Carlisle

@Werner hey I'm not sure about your edit though, I left out the image on purpose.

@Werner different \raggedright (the latex one isn't as good really:-)

Jake

1:47 AM

@DavidCarlisle I agree, it's much more satisfying if you have to compile it yourself

Werner

@DavidCarlisle ...blah...

David Carlisle

@Jake I hope you liked my TikZ reference:-)

Jake

@DavidCarlisle I did!

David Carlisle

night all..

Jake

Night

Joseph Wright

8:15 AM

@DavidCarlisle, @MartinScharrer I think I understand the XeTeX business :-)

Basically, it comes down to the fact that XeTeX lets you tackle things using both PostScript and PDF specials

I played around with both approaches, and in the versions I've written for expl3 have gone for the PDF specials as these seem to be 'better integrated' into xdvipdfmx (see pdf:bcontent, etc.)

However, the XeTeX graphics driver uses PostScript grouping (x:gsave and so on). So what happens is the two different approaches clash

David Carlisle

@JosephWright oops since you have no control over the content in general (except in l3:-) can't you add enough save/restore/normalise in both sets to isolate yourself from whatever's inside. It all has to be pdf in the end (most of the time)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Well what I can do is sort out the XeTeX driver so it uses just one method!

The question is which one: using the PDF method is easy for scaling:

\def\Grot@end{\special{pdf:econtent}}
\def\Gscale@start{%
  \special{pdf:bcontent}\special{pdf:literal direct  \Gscale@x\space 0 0 \Gscale@y\space 0 0 cm}}

David Carlisle

@JosephWright does for example tikz use the standard graphics driver or does it interface directly with its own special support (and pstricks)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle TikZ does everything itself, but seemed to have rather a lot of redundant lines. Perhaps these are all about covering those cases where there is a 'choice'. I'll have to check the detail.

David Carlisle

@JosephWright what does pdf@econtent generate, as I said last night generating a save/restore at different points always seems risky.

Joseph Wright

8:29 AM

@DavidCarlisle The bcontent/econtent pair is the 'official' way to do save/restore with xdvipdfmx

David Carlisle

@JosephWright yes what I mean is since the user can put pstricks and tikz into the content of \scalebox you can't really ensure that everything uses the same set of specials, unless you take control and ban \special except for the ones you allow.

@JosephWright That may be so, but it doesn't mean it works:-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle It certainly does work when used correctly

David Carlisle

@JosephWright ah there's the rub:-)

meanwhile I'll read the dvipdfmx manual at some point today if I get a chance:-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle I'm not sure that the TikZ drivers have been set up to cover working with PStricks/graphics, as the TikZ way to scale a box would be to use the correct TikZ command. As I said, no real comments in that code to guide me.

@DavidCarlisle OK, so do you suggest changing the clipping to use the same approach as for dvips?

As xetex.def seems to do that for scaling/rotation, I guess that is the lowest-risk approach

David Carlisle

@JosephWright well not really, it was a gut feeling based on half remembered 20 year old pain that save/restore lead to problems unless done at the same point. It may be that the built in bcontent/econtent special pairs effectively restore things anyway rather than doing a simple graphics state restore, but...

Andrew Stacey

8:40 AM

@DavidCarlisle Your solution involved changing catcodes, egreg's involved loading a whole new package (l3str), but it also contained the clue about l3tl-analysis which I'd never heard of and which looks extremely promising.

egreg

@DavidCarlisle What did I say? ;-)

David Carlisle

@AndrewStacey Traitor. Did you see last night's thread?

9 hours ago, by David Carlisle

@egreg surely @AndrewStacey wouldn't unaccept his own code

Andrew Stacey

@DavidCarlisle I did. But I figure it was only about 10% my code.

Brace yourselves, it's the oncoming storm:

6

Q: What outgoing migration paths should we have?

Now that we can migrate off topic questions, what sort of migration paths should be useful to have? I think that adding at least Cross Validated, if not one or two of the other science sites, would be reasonable.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle I'm not sure I follow about 'save/restore at the same point'

David Carlisle

@JosephWright later better do some work for a bit...

Joseph Wright

8:52 AM

@DavidCarlisle OK

@DavidCarlisle Oh, I think I see what you are getting at!

@MartinScharrer I'm pretty sure I now understand the issues. I need to work out the best solution, for you, for the LaTeX2 driver and for expl3. I'll update you on this later!

@MartinScharrer I think the 'safest' solution is

\def\@cliptoboxdim#1{%
    \setbox#1=\hbox{%
        \Gin@defaultbp\WIDTH{\wd#1}%
        \Gin@defaultbp\DEPTH{\dp#1}%
        \@tempdima\ht#1%
        \advance\@tempdima\dp#1%
        \Gin@defaultbp\TOTALHEIGHT{\@tempdima}%
        \special{pdf:content q }%
        \special{%
            pdf:literal direct
                0 -\DEPTH\space \WIDTH\space \TOTALHEIGHT\space re W n
        }%
        \special{pdf:literal direct -1 0 0 -1 0 0 cm }%
        \special{pdf:content q }%
        \special{pdf:literal direct -1 0 0 -1 0 0 cm }%

This addresses @DavidCarlisle's point as well as the issues with different graphics states

I'll update other code later on!