mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

Hi Daniele,

Sorry for the late reply...

On Thu, 2 Oct 2003, Daniele Pighin wrote:
> 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)

Strange; I did not change anything; they are still quite unstable...

> 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?

All this is indeed a worthy suggestion which should be put on our wish list.
One may also consider a special environment like "don't place floats
outside this environment". If you want floats to remain inside a section,
then you would just englobe the whole section in this environment.

Best wishes, Joris