It is possible to change the spacing between pararaphs.

In theory, a spacing of 0 could be used to flow two
paragraphs together.

In practice, this would break some documents where
jpluck used zero-space paragraphs for <BR>.

It (like those jpluck documents) would also confuse the 
advanced search features Alex mentioned.

(me)
> Alexander R. Pruss:
> > (1)  No more than two or three lines of previous context.
> > (2)  Nothing from a previous sentence.  (Or only one sentence?)
> > (3)  Nothing before (including?) a previous anchor.

> This would make it hard to visually locate the exact content 
> linked to from an index.

If we included length-of-target-text, it could be handled the same 
way that search results are.  It could be highlighted/underlined/
colorchanged.

Is there any reason not to include this information, so long as 
we're using a new function code anyhow?

Mike:
> Nope. A Plucker paragraph is the main building block of a Plucker
> record. I did write the first "blueprint" of the format in '99,
> so I guess I should know how we intended it to work ;-)

>From a strictly technical perspective, a "paragraph" *is* whatever
the code says it is.

>From a "make the code easier to understand" perspective, terms
like "paragraph" *should* mean something as close as possible
to our normal understanding of "paragraph".  If it isn't really
a paragraph, it *should* be called "block" or "textgroup" or
some such.  
 
Alexander R. Pruss:
> instead of introducing an "exact anchor" function, we could 
> introduce an "exact offset" function.  When this function
> is encountered at the beginning of an anchor that anchor is 
> changed from a paragraph-based anchor to an offset-based 
> anchor.

So the target anchor will be exactly the same, but the referencing
anchor will now have an (optional) offset.

> A more logical way of doing it, but one requiring SLIGHTLY 
> more code in control.c than my patch has, would be for the offset 
> to indicate not the offset from the top of the doc, but the offset 
> from the top of the referenced paragraph.  

I agree that it is a bit more code, but I think it is a better solution.

It also leaves the document more robust, which could matter if
we ever want to update documents instead of replacing them
wholesale, or allow links from other documents.

Which brings up another question -- should we include the
target ID, or should we stick with the paragraph count, and
assume that links on other pages may someday suffer from 
a confusing form of linkrot?  (This proposal doesn't make it
any worse; I'm just asking whether we should fix it while we
have the chance.)

-jJ
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