On 16/05/2011, at 6:13 AM, Frank Mittelbach wrote: > Now one could argue that that this behavior for \\ is useful (especially in > math for which amsmath reimplements it) but realistically what are the other > places that need this kind of behavior? This is a better point than any that I made :) [snip] > There would still be the question of control symbols viz control words. By > default a control symbol (e.g., \? \/ ...) will not skip spaces and \\ > actually explicitly has code to scan and ignore spaces so was deliberately put > into the command class by Leslie to get a consistent interface for his main > commands (and amsmath changed it back). > > But I find a single exception (if implemented) still preferable to the other > options. Okay, I'm happy with this. We should revert back to space-skipping behaviour; only question is what to do about control symbols? Practically, there are only a handful that you'd expect to see defined to take an optional argument, perhaps \\ and \+ and anything else a user wants to (re-)define. If we choose space-skipping then we're consistent with 2e; if not we're consistent with amsmath. I tend toward the latter but would also be happy to have \\ as a special case instead and go with the former. Cheers, -- Will