[latexrefman] \smash

[Hefferon, Jim S.]

I put in an entry for \smash.  I also changed the date to October.

The Makefile target commitready did not automatically add the _005csmash.html or bs-smash.html files; I will have to look another time.  

Bob, you'll see in the doc that, besides that I avoided copying from Knuth (I don't think he would care, but just as a general principle), I also added examples.  My experience in using online documentation is that I personally usually look to ape an example.  The doc is not a tutorial but it seems to me that besides covering what the command does, it makes sense to illustrate the command doing that thing.  We try to make the examples be something that a person would want to do, so I look  at various sources such as the latex stackexchange to see how people use the command.

One source I use is Gratzer.  He says \smash takes [t] or [b] to smash only the top or bottom of a subformula.  I tested that and could not get it to go (and the source did not look for optional arguments that I could see), so I did not put that in.

I have edited some entry suggestions in an html file that is not yet up since I just committed it.
  http://svn.gnu.org.ua/viewvc/latexrefman/trunk/writing.html?view=markup
Sorry, have to run now; I will try to get that up on my machine later.

Jim 

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_B_personality_disorders

________________________________________
From: latexrefman <latexrefman-bounces+jhefferon=smcvt.edu at tug.org> on behalf of Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 9, 2018 17:24
To: latexrefman at tug.org
Subject: Re: [latexrefman] First submission (text file attachment)

Hi Bob - thanks for this work. It's nice.

    \skip

I know this was listed as todo (sorry), but I somehow feel that \skip
(and \skipdef) should not be documented for LaTeX. Aren't people
supposed to use \newlength?

Also, as you know, TeX has a bunch of classes of register (count, dimen,
skip, muskip, toks, boxes). Documenting them all seems one step below
what LaTeX users or programmers should need. \new... should suffice?

        \smash ...
        Usage (from 'The TeXbook' p. 178):

Your description seems good to me, but we shouldn't quote substantial
text from The TeXbook (or anywhere else nonfree, or more precisely,
incompatibly licensed).

        This macro uses \smash, because - (minus) has the same height as
        + (plus).

.. in the CM fonts. I don't know what happens with \relbar when other
fonts are used that don't follow CM's math-character-concatenation
conventions ...

Thanks again,
Karl