Re: geometry package (Was: [Texmacs-dev] Applied patches)

[Nix]

On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 12:06, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 2592: Thanks for this upgrade. I still have to think on whether we
>   should systematically use the geometry package. If the user does
>   not specify a page size, then we probably should do nothing at all.

Well, it's a first implementation.  I believe the key in this patch is
that the tree that gets passed to texout.scm now contains an extra
entry.  This entry can be passed to texout just like the entry
representing the document body, but because it's a separate tree, it can
be placed before \begin{document} - as geometry information should be
placed.

The contents of this entry is still up for improvement.  The "geometry"
package seemed like a powerful and simple way of doing margins and paper
sizes.

To make the resulting LaTeX code resemble the "initial" block even more,
and to make it a bit clearer, I was thinking about changing the
converter to produce

\geometry{a4paper}   % paper size
\geometry{landscape} % orientation
\geometry{...}       % some other setting
...

instead of

\geometry{a4paper,landscape,...}

I believe we had a discussion about whether to pass TeXmacs defaults on
to LaTeX or not.  I don't believe we resolved it either way.  In my
opinion, we /should/ pass everything on, and change that policy only if
users don't like it.  Personally, I would like to see the LaTeX output
become the best of both PostScript and LaTeX worlds.  That is, the LaTeX
produced by TeXmacs should result in documents that "look" exactly as
the ones produced by TeXmacs directly (without the LaTeX conversion). 
This is the best of the PostScript world.

Secondly, the resulting LaTeX code should reflect the structure of the
TeXmacs document as closely as LaTeX will allow.  This is the best of
the LaTeX world.