Queries Present

TUGboat, Volume 12 (1991), No. 2 to create a macro to do this, none is known at Queries present. However, we discovered quite by accident a technique that may be of help: setting \hsize to some ridiculously small value will have the effect Public Domain SGML Tools Wanted of reporting the entire text to consist of overfull boxes. Since the hyphenations are shown in such I'm interested in determining what TJ$-to-SGML reports, the information sought will included. Un- (and vice-versa) translators are available in the pub- fortunately, some words will be broken at these lic domain, or any other public domain tools that hyphenation points. and would have to be recon- could serve as a starting point for such translators structed. Another technique that might be worth (i.e., w-to-troff?). I'm familiar with some of the tinkering with is to save up each paragraph as a to- commercial packages (i.e., ArborText's Publisher) ken string and send it through \showhyphensI . ); providing document import/export capability, but we didn't have time to try it out, though. am specifically seeking public domain materials. A technique for printing out a word with hy- Jeff Lankford phens assigned by TEX is given by the kacro Northrop Research and \printhyphens in the file for the TUGboat hy- Technology Center phenation list report; this file, TBOHYF .TeX, can Palos Verdes, CA 90274 be found at labrea.Stanford . edu in the directory j lankf ordD /tex/tugboat and also at other TEX archives. nrtc.nrtc.northrop.com Edttor's note: A public domain parser has been developed under the auspices of the Xational In- stitute of Standards and Technology (NIST). but at this time it is incomplete; it also does not understand QX. No other prospects had turned Letters up by press time. However. a group known as the "Text Encoding Initiative" is composed largely of humanities scholars who are interested in such tools. and any information on the subject is likely Response to Victor Eijkhout to be made public on their discussion list. TEI- I thank Victor Eijkhout for his knowledgeable and LQUICVM.Bitnet. generally favorable review of the book ?&X for the Impatient that I wrote with Karl Berry and Kathryn Hargreaves (TUGboat 11(4), Nov 1990, p. 572). I particularly appreciate his comments about the book being written very clearly and the information in it being readily accessible, since those were primary goals for us when we wrote it. Reporting W'sHyphenations I'm also pleased that he feels that the book would make it easier for new users to learn TEX. I do want Is there a macro (or a version of w)which can to respond, however, to a few of his comments. create a file containing a complete list of hyphenated He mentions being perturbed by small errors words in a document? For work with rather long in the book and cites two of them: texts it would be desirable and it also should help in improvements of national hyphenation tables. 1. "The delimiters around \. .withdelims com- mands don't grow as the authors claim." In Jifi Vesel3; fact, we made no such claim; our description Sokolovsk&83 on page 201 simply states that a construct CS-186 00 Prague 8 is surrounded by delimiters. It says nothing Czechoslovakia about how big they are. Bitnet: UMMJVQCSEARN 2. "The remarks about the depth (height) of a Editor's note: To our knowledge. there isn't any \vbox (\vtop) on pages 52 and 161/2 are at version of that will produce such a list au- odds." True, but the discrepancy is pretty tomatically. and though it's undoubtedly possible minor; the difference shows up only in the case TUGboat, Volume 12 (1991), No. 2 303 where the first or last item in the vertical list is Regarding whether or not delimiters grow, he a whatsit. Tm would probably be better off, is correct that no such claim is made on page 201; in fact, if a \write at the start of the vertical instead, it appears on page 58 with the defini- list of a \vtop had no effect on the height of tion of "delimiter" : "However, 'I)$ performs the the \vtop. adjustment only if the delmiter appears in a 'de- rn for the Impatient has a great many refer- limiter context' . (see pp. 201, 204)." Maybe ences to particular pages of The mbook. Eijkhout "Even though I was the principal author of m concludes from this that !l$Jfor the Impatient is for the Impatient, I don't claim to remember ev- not aimed at aspiring hackers. I'd agree that the erything that's in it!" can be used as attenuating book is not sufficient by itself for rn hackers-we circumstance. didn't intend it to be. We expect that hackers will As to differences between the depth (height) of use it in conjunction with The Wbook, and we a \vbox (\vtop), the discrepancy ("the difference say as much in our preface. shows up only in the case where the first or last Used this way, rn for the Impatient largely item in the vertical list is a whatsit") is minor but compensates for The mbook's well-recognized important. I might not have known this fact if shortcomings. The Wbook is indispensable as some rather befuddled user hadn't asked me what the definitive source of information on W, but on earth was going on when he wrote a big problem with The mbook is that it's very \def \caption#lC\hboxi\hboxi . )\vtopi#l33 hard to retrieve information from it. Essential and subsequently used this as topics appear in odd places, e.g., the description of \captioni\labeli. .3 .3 registers in the middle of the chapter on How T)JX . Makes Lines into Pages. The index has so many and found the text dropping a line because of the references under each entry that it's hard to locate \label command. So it does occur in practice. the definitive one, and the one that's marked as Victor Eijkhout definitive often gives just the syntax of a command, [email protected] not its semantics. Part of our reason for often referring to The mbook was to make for the Impatient useful as a guide to The Wbook as well as a guide to TpX. In my own work I use both books. I refer to rn for the Impatient for quick answers to most questions and to The mbookfor things such as the in Schools: Why Not? details of particular algorithms and the definitions of the plain T@i macros. Even though I was the In the March issue of TUGboat, Konrad Neuwirth principal author of TJjX for the Impatient, I don't claims that there is no place for 'I)$ in schools. He claim to remember everything that's in it! claims, "No, there is no place where 7&X fits into Paul Abrahams schools. It is too big, too powerful." 214 River Road My experience is that nothing is too powerful Deerfield, MA 01342 for schools. In fact, one of the biggest problems abrahms%wayne-mtsQ with schools in America (and, it seems, world- um.cc.umich.edu wide) is that people underestimate the intellectual capabilities of young people. We have been using at Woburn High School in Woburn, Massachusetts, for about five years, and its popularity is growing with both faculty and students. Before describing what we do with let me first say that we don't write Response to Paul Abrahams programs in it. I don't ask my students to write a rn program to filter primes from a list. Neither Paul Abrahams mentions two instances where my do I ask them to write a Logo program to format a review cited errors in T&Y for the Impatient; his paper. Different tools have different uses. explanations do not remove the problems. Here's how has been used by the faculty: TUGboat, Volume 12 (1991), No. 2 Two of us put together a series of over 100 and papers that need the high quality appear- problem sets in linear algebra. We took years ance of w. The students in this course are of handwritten and poorly typed worksheets, very adept at learning new things and QjX is a and, at a rate of one per day, formatted them program that is understood by these students in w. These sets were bound and passed very quickly. Another route we are taking is out to students as workbooks, and the reaction through the Business Education Department from students has been quite positive. Not at Woburn High School. Here students learn having to decipher our handwriting is one less rn along with Word Perfect and Techwriter. hurdle for them. By doing this they get to see the high quality We conducted a QX based course for the fac- output of TEX compared to other systems and ulty. The goal of the course was simple: Each can appreciate the work they put in a TEX week, teachers brought an exam or problem document better. Last semester in this course set to format, and we developed the w con- we concentrated on imitating pages from en- structions as they were needed (we used the gineering textbooks using w. We got used AMS-T@ macros). The teachers produced to using some of the easier to moderate w some very nice materials. codes and using special formats, including Students have also been using w: the AMS-~macro package and IPw.

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