Lars said:

> As I understand the Omega draft documentation, there can be no more than
> one OTP (the \InputTranslation) acting on the input of LaTeX at any time
> and that OTP in only meant to handle the basic conversion from the external
> encoding (ASCII, latin-1, UTF-8, or whatever) to the internal 32-bit
> Unicode. All this happens way before the input gets tokenized, so there is
> by the way no point in worrying about what the OTP should do with control
> sequences.
>
> The next time any OTP gets to act on the characters is when they are being
> put onto a horizontal list---this is where the OTPs can be stacked and one
> OTP can act on the output on another---i.e., in the first stage of _output_
> from LaTeX. Yet these are what is described as "Input: set of input
> conventions" (maybe because the Omega draft documentation calls them "Input
> filters") in the itemize-list on page 8!! (Note: I am not questioning
> whether this is a correct summary of the debate---if I am questioning
> anything it is rather the idea expressed in the original contribution.)
> Certainly there is a need for some OTPs to act on the text at this stage,
> but some of the processing should rather be done on the input side of LaTeX
> (for which the current Omega seems to provide very little). I note that the

I don't see the point of doing that. Processing information after full
expansion is essentially LaTeX without inputenc and fontenc, and very little
code will be broken. Processing the source when it's read could break lot
of things. This means that auxiliary files will have different coding
conventions and therefore differente processes should be applied depending
on the file to be read. I think that is an unnecessary complication.

One of the problems here is if the code to be moved around should be
processed first and then moved (like floats) or moved first and then
processed (like marks). imo, the answer is definitely the second --
have you tried placing a caption of a figure in the outer margin
of the page? (impossible without modifying the output routine because
figures and captions are first boxed and then moved). As I said,
preserving the original code when moving it around it's essential
to avoid a mess, and in fact that is the very reason things are
\protect'ed. This way, decisions could be taken depending on the
final placement of the material (for example, should be a Japanese
caption typeset vertically or horizontally?).

Regards
Javier