[l2h] Trouble with control space

[Anthony Stone]

At 11:41 on 10 February, Greg Gamble wrote:

 > On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 12:26:42PM +0000, Anthony Stone wrote:
 > > I'm having trouble with LaTeX2html's treatment of "control space",
 > > i.e. backslash followed by space, which TeX and LaTeX use to force a
 > > space after a control sequence. That is, if I say
 > > \newcommand{\foo}{{\sc Foo}}
 > > to get Foo in caps and small caps, I have to write \foo\ in the LaTeX
 > > source in order to make sure it is followed by a space.
 > 
 > Dear Anthony,
 > 
 > This is a `feature', not of LaTeX2HTML, but of (La)TeX which uses a space
 > to separate tokens. You will find that the space disappears in your .dvi,
 > .ps and .pdf versions as well. You need to do one of:
 > 
 >   ... \foo\ FOLLOWING TEXT
 >   ... \foo~FOLLOWING TEXT
 >   ... {\foo} FOLLOWING TEXT
 >
 > [snip]

Thank you. I am already using the first of these constructions (i.e. 
"control space", in the terminology of the TeXbook), as I thought I
made clear. The problem is that not only does it not work, it seems
that some of the following material gets gobbled up and lost.

I am also aware of the workarounds suggested, and I can use one or
more of them in running text. The problem also arises in math mode,
where "\ " is used to force a space. Most of the workarounds do not
work here, though I can achieve what I want, for example by defining
\spc to mean \mkern6mu and using that instead.

The fact is that "\ " doesn't behave in LaTeX2html as it does in
LaTeX. I believe that this is a bug. The fact that there are
workarounds doesn't alter this.

-- 
Anthony Stone                           www-stone.ch.cam.ac.uk
University Chemical Laboratory,         Email:  ajs1 at cam.ac.uk
Lensfield Road,                         Phone: +44 1223 336375
Cambridge CB2 1EW                       Fax:   +44 1223 336362