[texhax] A strange behaviour with tabular and makeindex

[Morten Høgholm]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 09:04:39 +0200, Christoph Schiller  
<cs at motionmountain.net> wrote:

> This minimal example behaves badly on my TeX system:
> (pdflatex, 2005 Mac version from Gerben Wierda)
>
> \documentclass{article}
> \makeindex
> \begin{document}
>   \begin{tabular}{ p{30mm} p{32mm} p{28mm} }%
>   %
>   satellite & car crash & \index{rocket}rocket \\
>   %
>   \end{tabular}
> \end{document}
>
> The three items are not aligned; the "rocket" is
> one line below the other two items.
>
> The behaviour is ok if \makeindex is taken out,
> or if the last p{28mm} is changed to a "l".
>
> Is this the case in other TeX systems as well?

Yes, TeX's peculiarities are the same on all systems. Here, the \index  
command creates a whatsit node which also happens to move the reference  
point of the table cell.

This is not trivial to solve but it can be done. As I noted here on texhax  
a few days ago in the thread about multipage frames, a more advanced  
structure is needed to get these things to work properly and fortunately  
someone already did.
-- 
Morten