Lars wrote, > At 21.35 +0100 2000-03-05, Reinhard Kotucha wrote: > >Hi, > >unfortunately Frank told us in his last mail that he vanishes for a > >few days to work on output routines. > > I wonder when he will appear again? It's been a month. OTOH, output > routines are tricky things, so it is hardly surprising that it takes time. here he is but he is going to vanish again in a few minutes :-) have to do preparations for the DANTE meeting where i like to show some of the new stuff yes output routines are tricky beasts but the work we did last mont was well spend, i think. i hope to be able to present parts of it real soon on this list on the www server. so much for now: - the pages produced from the new OR are looking horrible :-) and it is slower and can't do a lot the old could - but we are really feeling good about it as it has the potential and it is getting there. what it can right now is - doing multiple columns (up to 6 right now but this is not a restriction) - handle different float strategies, eg float after callout, float after or on the same column, float on the same page - deal with bottom floats when footnotes are involved (disallow them, decide where the footnote goes ... - allow absolute manual control if needed. ie writes a float position file and all you have to do is to move lines in that file to move floats around. - allows for \flushfloat which outputs all floats before the current point without starting a new page - allows for caption positioning depending on placement - allows for changing the position algorithm - will soon handle page spreads (essentially considering a spread as a multicolumn situation) - will soon do spanning floats - will (hopefully) soon do marginal floats right now it is roughly 40 pages code and growing (and buggy :-) but ... as for the page hook. somethig like that should be definitely become part of that OR. > PS: When I wrote about tracefnt anyway, I might as well mension this thing > too. Could it be possible to have the option reinserted that temporarily > resetted the \tracing... parameters during \selectfont? Appearently this > feature was bundled with something else that probably doesn't work anymore, > but I can't see any reason (apart from lack of time) why it shouldn't be > possible to reinsert just this particular feature. I'm so tired of wading > through screenful after screenful of font selection every time I need to > trace a piece of code that, apart from the things I'm really interested in, > also does a couple of font changes. wish granted. in fact while working on the OR and other things i got so tired of such output that i wrote a small little package called trace that implements that kind of stuff. putting it into tracfnt is not a good idea as there is more than just font stuff one wants to disable. it is right now in Barbara Beeton's hand as a submission for TUB and i'm going to put it onto the WWW in a few days. good night frank