On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 9:19 AM, Joseph Wright wrote:

Paul,

>> 2) some better looping or array mechanism
>>
>> 3) some better storage mechanism, so that a rudimentary database can be constructed.  I have done this in newlfm, but it should be a bit easier.
>
> Again, something like this is on my "list", at least. We have some
> looping and data structuring code, but at the moment nothing for
> databases. As Will points out, I suspect datatool will provide some
> inspiration.

If you look at the current version of datatool, you'll see that its
data structure for the database is more or less an extended version of
sequences. This is no coincidence...

Expl3 already contains property lists and sequences for storage - take
a look at it and see if that doesn't get you quite a bit of the way.
And yes, you can loop through these easily.

>
>> 4) some better mid-document margin control, so that margins can change by user choice.  Several have told me that this is not possible, but I have hacked the output routine and am quite clear that it is.

It depends on what you mean. It is entirely possible to change the
margins mid page - that is what the list environments do more or less.
What cannot be done is to change margins mid paragraph. Once the
paragraph has been broken into lines, then that's it. If you make the
text wider, the paragraph is not reflowed.

-- 
Morten