mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Joris van der Hoeven <address@hidden>]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 10:35:34AM +0000, Sam Liddicott wrote:
> My daughter is producing interview transcripts in a notation like this:
> 
> My daughter is producing interview transcripts in a notation like this:
> 
> Tim: and sometimes you have to [consult with the      ] with the parents
> Jon:                           [well you don't have to]
> Tim: well you should consult [with them   ]
> Ali:                         [well we know] we know you should but
>      sometimes you can't do that, it's not always possible to do that
> 
> 
> What she has to do is using word or open office, overlay large braces onto
> the document but it is very badly anchored and a difficult process. The
> text example shows single [ characters but in reality it is a brace
> spanning multiple lines.
> 
> I've tried to work out an abstract model for it to see if TeXmacs could
> handle it as anchored braces, and the model is this.
> 
> Named open-brace and named close-brace.
> 
> Each instance of a named brace is left-padded with white space so that each
> brace of the same name has the same horizontal position. The brace is drawn
> with the top at the first occurrence with the bottom at the last
> occurrence.
> 
> The harder bit is that text must not overlay the brace or vice-versa so
> when there are multiple lines between the top and bottom of the brace,
> typesetting must skip over the brace.
> 
> Braces need not come in pairs.
>
> The UI could have 2 actions, insert named brace (open or close) and insert
> previous named brace.
> 
> However I think that TeXmacs typesetting is not able to manage the wrapping
> around brace parts - is this the case? 

A good model for this kind of things is tables.
The braces should be put in cells with a row span > 1.
Unfortunately, TeXmacs does not yet implement braces which span
over the height of a cell.  This kind of feature would actually
be useful in other situations, e.g. when aligning an explicit
matrix product.  I plan to implement it since a long while
(I also think that it is part of MathML).  Of course, a temporary
hack would be to manually put brackets of the right sizes.

Best wishes, --Joris