-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
The reason this happens is that TeX ignores the space that ends a
\command. That way you can write something like "\latex ed" to get
"LaTeXed" with fancy superscripting and no space.
To get around it, you need to terminate the command before TeX sees the
space. So either use "\command\ " (The slash space ends a command and is
a space.) or "\command{} ". Since {} just does grouping in TeX, \command
doesn't need to take an argument.
Oh, and tell your friend that TeX is Turing complete and can fill any
line noise requirements even better than perl. ;)
Hope that helps,
Jeffrey
William L. Jarrold wrote:
| I have a weird macro issue that with which would appreciate some help.
|
| Actually, by the time I got 75% through writing this, I figured out
| how to resolve my immediate bug. However, as you'll see my happier
| solution still feels sort of hackish. And as a result I feel a little
| uneasy about using latex for the hundreds of use cases like the one
| you'll see below. Any sage advice to either do something like appease
| my worries or to convince me to abandon latex in favor of something
| more like linux (wrt to linux's transparency and predictability) would
| be appreciated.
|
| Okay, now for my story. By the end of the story you'll see what I am
| after...
|
| I use a template to write these schematized (aka templatized) patient
| reports as part of my work as a psychology intern. Sometimes they are
| about females, sometimes they are about males. So, my template.tex
| file is agnostic with respect to sex of the patient. So, I might have
| something like this near the top of my template.tex file...
|
| \newcommand{\hisher}[0]{his or her}
|
| \newcommand{\HeShe}[0]{He or She}
|
| ...then deep in the body of my report, I might have something like
| this...
|
| The following test results are felt to be valid and reliable estimates
| of \hisher current functioning.
|
| ....or this...
|
| \HeShe was delivered via unplanned C-section.
|
| ...So, lets say I need to write a report on a male patient, Joe.
| Well, I simply copy my template.tex to joe.tex and then edit joe.tex
| such that, in joe.tex, the two macros look like this...
|
| \newcommand{\hisher}[0]{his}
| \newcommand{\HeShe}[0]{He}
|
| ....sound good? Well, there's a problem. The problem is that latex
| refuses to put a space after occurences of the macro. Thus, if I do
| ...
|
| latex joe.tex
|
| ...and then read joe.dvi using my own eyes (via xdvi or somesuch) it
| reads like this...
|
| Hewas delivered via unplanned C-section.
|
| ...well that ain't right -- we humans like to have spacesbetween
| ourwords. Itmakes things easiertoread....So what do I do? Well at
| this point I must resort to the following hack. I trick latex into
| putting a spaces after each macro. Instead of writing the macro
| thusly...
|
| \newcommand{\HeShe}[0]{He}
|
| ...I write it like so...
|
| \newcommand{\HeShe}[0]{He }
|
| ...well, that is bad. For example, suppose I have a sentence in my
| template.tex like so...
|
| \HeShe, heavily sedated, did not say very much during the clinical
| interview.
|
| ...well, then in the .dvi file I'd have something that would look like
| this...
|
| He , heavily sedated, did not say very much during the clinical
| interview.
|
| ...well, that's bad punctuation. It should look like this...
|
| He, heavily sedated, did not say very much during the clinical
| interview.
|
| ......HMM, I just got an idea...What if I do the macro like this...
|
| \newcommand{\hisher}[1]{***hisher#1}
|
| ...and then, instead of doing calls to the macros the old way, like
| this...
|
| The following test results are felt to be valid and reliable estimates
| of \hisher current functioning.
|
| ...instead, I do them the new way like this...
|
| The following test results are felt to be valid and reliable estimates
| of \hisher{} current functioning.
|
| ...CHA CHING!!! That works.
|
| So, at the end of my story, you should see that, in a sense I am
| happy. In a sense my immediate problem is resolved. However, my
| faith in the transparency of latex has been weakened. I don't like
| programs that behave quirkily (like Windoze, for example (-:). A
| friend of mine who I respect urges me to abandon my attempts to
| templatize/semi-automate my report writing activities using latex (the
| kind of automation you see above is hopefully merely the tip of a
| complex iceberg underconstruction). He says I should push as much
| autoreport generation functionality into perl.
|
| In sum, if someone can show me why all the above latex behavior is
| logical, I'll be a little less skeptical of latex. Or if someone can
| convince me to use something else, I'm all ears.
|
| Hrm, as you can prolly tell by the length of this, I don't have much
| to do tonight.
|
| Bill
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFAACQVfjbRRQT0l5URAkxNAKCNFQnVTbz/ZU2rQpAKQboJb3JzHACg709C
doje7joJooi+3M7zls2EA3Y=
=PBa5
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
_______________________________________________
Siglinux mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://machito.utacm.org/mailman/listinfo/siglinux
