[texhax] TeX vs LaTeX primitives

[Victor Ivrii]

On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 1:16 AM, Reinhard Kotucha
<reinhard.kotucha at web.de>wrote:

> If you are using TeX primitives instead of LaTeX macros you certainly
> lose parts of LaTeX's functionality.
>




Reinhard's response raises in me 2 questions (apart of the question of
etiquette which I suspect could be discussed longer than the developments
of LaTeX 3, industrial use of controlled fusion and fixing all bugs in MSW
combined):


1) In particular: I use very seldom hbox to avoid breakage of lines in
multiline environment (f.e. in the title of the chapter) or  for some other
exotic reasons (example below) when everything else I tried failed. What
one can do instead?

2) How in general distinguish truly LaTeX macros?

Victor Ivrii


Example:

I wanted a kind of multiline but with right hand expressions aligned by
their left (so no multiline with \shoveright{}) but I wanted the
``overlapping'' of the left and rich hand expressions (so normal align
would not work). I cannot recall  how I found solution below but it
produced result I wanted:

\documentclass[12pt]{memoir}
\usepackage{mathtools}

\begin{document}

\begin{equation*}
\begin{array}{@{} l l @{}r}
x \upsilon_n =&\frac{1}{2} \Bigl(
(2n+2)^{1/2}\upsilon_{n+1} + (2n)^{1/2}\upsilon_{n-1}\Bigr),\\[10pt]
x^2 \upsilon_n =&
\frac{1}{4}\Bigl(
(2n+2)^{1/2}(2n+4)^{1/2}\upsilon_{n+2} + (4n+2)\upsilon_n +
(2n)^{1/2}(2n-2)^{1/2}\upsilon_{n-2}\Bigr),\\[10pt]
\hbox to 0pt{$\bigl(x ^2-2n-1)\upsilon_n =$\hss} \\[5pt]
&\frac{1}{4}\Bigl(
(2n+2)^{1/2}(2n+4)^{1/2}\upsilon_{n+2} -
2(2n+1) \upsilon_n+
(2n)^{1/2}(2n-2)^{1/2}\upsilon_{n-2}\Bigr),\\[5pt]
\hbox to 0pt{$x\bigl(x ^2-2n-1)\upsilon_n =$\hss}\\[10pt]
&\frac{1}{8}\Bigl(
(2n+2)^{1/2}(2n+4)^{1/2}(2n+6)^{1/2}\upsilon_{n+3} -
(2n+2)^{1/2}(2n-2)\upsilon_{n+1}-\\[5pt]
&\hbox{\qquad\qquad\quad$(2n)^{1/2}(2n+4)\upsilon_{n-1}+
(2n)^{1/2}(2n-2)^{1/2}(2n-4)^{1/2}\upsilon_{n-3}\Bigr),$}
\end{array}
\end{equation*}
\end{document}
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