[texhax] KyAnh's QUIZ, No. 1

[Barbara Beeton]

anh,

i'm not going to give a "direct" explanation, but tell you
how to look up the answers to some of your questions,

    1. \@bsphack, \@esphack

       Please tell me about these macros.

these are among the "basic" latex macros.  they are defined
in the file ltspace.dtx, which carries quite a bit of
discussion about their intent and implementation.  if they're
not on your current tex installation, all the basic latex
.dtx files can be found on ctan in the macros/latex/base
area.  to get an easily readable version of any dtx file,
just process it with latex.

    5. Use \\, \par or <page break>?

       Everytime I want a new paragraph,
       I leave a blank line in the input.
       I rarely use the \\.

       What's the difference between
         \\, \par, and <page break>?

\\ is a line break.  in text, it's used most often for explicit
line divisions in poetry.  it's also the latex command for
ending a row in a table.

\par is an almost exact equivalent for a blank line in your
file.  in plain tex, it is exactly equivalent, but there are
some modifications in latex that can be discovered by looking
through the various basic latex .dtx files.

i'm not exactly sure what you mean by <page break>.

if you mean the actual place where the end of a page occurs
in output, that could coincide with a paragraph break.

if you mean a command to break to a new page, that can be
done in several ways:
 - the latex command \newpage; defined in ltoutput.dtx; see
   also \clearpage, defined in the same module
 - \penalty-10000 -- the tex primitive; also \break :
   - alone, it will cause a page break with anything on the
     page stretched out to fill the page to the designated size
   - preceded by \vfill any material on the page will be set to
     its natural length and then go on to a new page
   the latex commands use this penalty mechanism internally
 - \eject -- plain tex equivalent of \par\break; not recommended
   for use in latex, although it's defined

(\bye = \par\vfill\supereject\end, where \supereject is similar
to \eject using a special penalty -20000 that causes tex to
make sure that all material has been output, which may require
one or more additional pages.  plain only, not latex.)

    6. Thank you very much
       for your reading this email
       and for your answerring.
       Please correct my mis-spelling.

only one misspelling:
 - answerring = answering
one case of verb usage, or perhaps just a typo:
 - b) How can we redefined the \def...
                 ^^^^^^^^^ redefine

hope this helps.
							-- bb