[pracjourn-forum] Re: Pitfalls (was: Some initial thoughts

[Peter Flynn]

On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 13:57, Karl Berry wrote:
>     Could the list at http://www.ucc.ie:8080/cocoon/cc/elec-pub/latex/howto
>     (which I cobbled together from Christina's excellent 
>     set of comments) form a basis for this?
> 
> It seems like a very nice start.  Naturally I can't resist comments:
> 
> - What's wrong with \pounds?  (Maybe links to fuller
>   explanations are desirable in some cases.)

Nothing except that I was under the impression it was deprecated.

> - Not sure helico-pter is the best example of hyphenation.  That is an
>   extremely weird/wrong hyphenation in US English.  

One of my personal favourites :-) but yes, it's too idiosyncratic.

>   How about an example
>   that is the same in US and UK, e.g., data-base?  Ghost-script?  (And
>   this points that giving the command to set hyphenation would be
>   valuable.)

If we can find suitable non-culturally-specific examples that would
be great. analy-tic is one that sometimes needs avoiding :-)

> - Instead of mentioning \verb solely for _, I suggest just mentioning
>   \verb and \begin{verbatim} (and alltt?) separately.  People do need
>   every character in verbatim mode, but it's rather a different case
>   than getting the chars in roman.

Good point.

> - Instead of "Reserved Characters" for the first heading, I suggest
>   "Special Characters", and add one more entry: "for 8-bit
>   (pre-accented) characters, use \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} (or
>   latin2 or ...)" ...or whatever we're supposed to do these days.

Yep.

> - The image of the top of a browser window (or whatever it is) seems a
>   bit odd as an example of leaders.

I wasn't thinking. It's what my stylesheet does if I include verbatim
HTML, on the assumption that it's meant to be an example, and I stuffed
a table in there to try and fake up an expanding dot leader. Duuuh.

>     As this is a discrete task, not actually bound to the
>     PracJourn work, I suggest we take it to a forum of its
>     own (eg pitfalls at tug.org or something...Karl?)
> 
> If there's a lot of people here who don't want to be in on this, it
> would make sense.  But I suspect the 12 or so of us on this list are all
> interested.

OK.

>     I suggest the first step would be to ensure the list of
>     reserved characters is bulletproof, so that anyone following
> 
> I don't see any others on my keyboard for plain and LaTeX.
> Does ConTeXt reserve other characters?

< and > and | are there, which often baffle the newcomer.

Does anyone still have/use the ¬ character (old IBM "NOT" key: on my old
clickety IBM keyboard it's to the left of the 1! key).

Are there function keys on those "Internet keyboards" beloved of Dell,
Gateway, etc (which presumably bind to Windows applications) which will
insert odd characters when used in a text editor?

///Peter