mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Daniele Pighin <address@hidden>]

Hi there,
I'm finally writing my thesis and struggling with floats :)

(well, I'm very very happy that using floats does no longer result in making 
the editor unusable, anyhow)

I was wondering wether it was possible to go for a more WYSIWINeed approach, 
that is: rather than placing floats relative to the page (top, bottom and so 
on) placing them relative to the environment.

I'll try to explain myself.

It is annoying (and sometimes makes floats useless) that a figure that should 
be placed in section "1.1 goats and sheeps", representing a plumpy sheep 
licking the grass around, is actually displayed under section "1.2 the camel 
and the bee", just because, say, the latter section begins on the very same 
page in which I have added the float.

To make things worse, when you are working in texmacs, especially for large 
documents, it is very likely that you don't know where a page begins or ends, 
so it doesn't make that sense talking about a top and a bottom.
Furthermore, this kind of placement is layout rather than structure oriented, 
and TeXmacs claims, among other things, to set the user free of the need to 
worry about the layout, at least as far as it is possible.

I think that it wold be lovely to control floats' positioning relative to the 
environment I've added them, so that I can have the float displayed, say:
- everywhere within the very same paragraph
- everywhere within the environment i'm in
- everywhere within the parent environment (if there is a parent environment, 
of course).

Wouldn't such an approach be more intuitive and closer to what floats are 
meant to be, objects that can be placed wherever thay make sense?

Thanks for your kind attention

Daniele