[texhax] create float based on longtable?

[Pierre MacKay]

On 01/28/2010 09:38 AM, Christoph Haug wrote:
> Thank you, Susan, for your quick response.
>
> 2010/1/28 Susan Dittmar<Susan.Dittmar at gmx.de>:
>    
>> Dear Christoph,
>>
>> it is impossible to have *floating* elements longer than a page.
>>      
>    
Since Susan Dittmar has at last brought the question up, it may help to 
note that way back in the dawn of TeX, DEK pointed out that \halign was 
primarily designed for matrix algebra and was, if anything, deprecated 
for general use.  If you need a table to go beyond the limits of a page, 
or to be guaranteed to fall into a specific position on a page, the 
appropriate tool is \settable.  It can take some careful design to 
insure that chunks of a table with differing offsets are all provided 
for, but if you don't want to do that, you can always terminate one 
section of a table, start and finish a variant section, and then copy 
the paradigm of the first table to start out again.  Treat every line of 
the table as a paragraph and the page breaks will take care of 
themselves.  Or \vfil\eject can be called in to play.

After years of sweating blood over \halign, I gave up using it for 
purposes it was not really meant for about ten years ago, and I will 
quote, at the risk of seeming too self-satisfied, the reaction to one of 
my latest efforts:

Brilliant work on these tables!

The tables in question covered five pages.

Pierre MacKay