shorthands

> But to handle shorthands you have
> to do this  by hand, picking them up parsing the compound value, and
> assigning to the lower level property macros. It is a lot of extra work

the reason why it's a _lot_ of extra work is that in FO more or less any
attribute can be set anywhere and it inherits down. So this means that
the code to decode each shorthands has to be available (in XSLT
terminology) on every template for every element.

Currently in xmltex you can globally say every element in the FO
attribute has an attribute foo, and its value should be stored in (say)
\FOfoo, and it should be inherited.

For such attributes passivetex just needs to declare them, then can use
\FOfoo in any element and you get the value defined on a suitable
ancestor.

To support FO shorthands, passivetex would have to have code in every
element template to handle each shorthand, or I get persuaded that this
is a general XML requirement and think of some way of having a global
declaration that says that every attribute in some namespace should be
handled by some code (rather than just being stored in a macro, to be
handled by element code). Either way it's a major complication.

David


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Received on Tuesday, 13 February 2001 12:49:43 UTC