Re: pagenumbers and the -s (no cross references) option

[Mark Summerfield]

On Fri 24-Nov-06 14:42, address@hidden wrote:
>  > To get a quick overview on the layout(book), I compile
>  > the document with -s. For the final layout, I compile
>  > with -r5 or similar, which is very handy.
>  > But the layout in both cases is diffrent:
>  >
>  > With the -s option, I get ?? instead of pagenumbers.
>  > OK, but although I have
>  >
>  > @IntroOddFoot      { @Centre @PageNum      }
>  > @IntroEvenFoot     { @Centre @PageNum      }
>  >
>  > in the setup-file the "??" are written to the top of the page and
>  > they seem to take up a little bit more space, because the last line
>  > of every page is then written to the next page.
>  > (Additionally I get ?? on @OnTitelPage, where normally no
>  > Pagenumbers show up, but thats no real problem)
>
> This is another instance of the problem that I observed long ago:
> The fact that unresolved (or, more general, un-finalised) cross-references
> can take up more space than their finalised version
> breaks space-monotonicity,
> and therefore (at least) delays convergence to the fixed-point.
>
> At the time I proposed to replace "??" with "_"
> (and even submitted a patch) ---
> this solved the problem for me
> (a talk full of full slides previously took O(number of slides) runes),
> but was rejected by Jeff --- if I recall correctly,
> for ``user-friendliness'' reasons.
>
> Since Lout is otherwise a relatively principled affair,
> one should give this another try ---
> perhaps at least use very small, bold "??",
> so that in most cases they end up being not larger than the final thing.
>
> For George's problem, they would actually have to have the SAME height,
> wich may be easy for the default formats, but hard in general.

I think these markers are used for two _different_ purposes:

(1) To get a quick idea of the final layout
(2) To show cross-references that are missing (maybe mistyped)

In case (2), using _ would make them very hard to spot. Personally I
wish the marker was
    {red @Colour{??}} or even {red @address@hidden a102 @Ding a102}}
because I want to see them! (I know that missing cross-references are
given in the error output, but I still find seeing them in the document
is helpful.)

When I preview I always do lots of passes. And this is quite fast
because I do as Jeff suggests and have a master file which lists my
chapters as @Includes and I comment out all but the one I am working on,
and either I don't have any @Index tags or I have them in comments:

### address@hidden

These can be uncommented at the end with a quick script, and without
them lout is much faster. I hadn't thought of using -s though, so I'll
have to give that a try.

-- 
Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd., www.qtrac.eu