enchanced Jade TeX backend

[Sebastian Rahtz <s.rahtz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have made some changes to the Jade TeX backend which may be of
interest to others, and have adjusted the TeX macros accordingly. The
revised macro package and the patched sources are on the TeX CTAN
archives in macros/jadetex/beta for those willing to rebuild
Jade. Hopefully James will incorporate the changes in 0.9.

The changes are:

 1. reduced size of macro names to make output file less bulky
 2. added a couple of extra braces here and there to make things work
 3. added support for:

(declare-characteristic page-n-columns
      "UNREGISTERED::James Clark//Characteristic::page-n-columns" 1)
(declare-characteristic page-column-sep
      "UNREGISTERED::James Clark//Characteristic::page-column-sep" 4pt)

 4. added support for:

(declare-characteristic preserve-sdata?
      "UNREGISTERED::James Clark//Characteristic::preserve-sdata?" #f)
  
  for those with weird entity names (like me). The effect is to
  write \Entity{foo} when &foo; is met. By default in Jadetex this
  prints &foo; and gives a warning - obviously you have to supply
  definitions in your jade.cfg file

 5. added three new flow objects:

(declare-flow-object-class page-float
      "UNREGISTERED::Sebastian Rahtz//Flow Object Class::page-float")
(declare-flow-object-class page-footnote
      "UNREGISTERED::Sebastian Rahtz//Flow Object Class::page-footnote")
(declare-flow-object-class page-display
      "UNREGISTERED::Sebastian Rahtz//Flow Object Class::page-display")

 The first two are straightforward floats and footnotes; the last
 makes a display object that can span the whole width of the page; 
 it can use the span: characteristic, though in fact Jadetex ignores
 that and always does a full-width display.

 The point of this is to allow creation of a common layout in which
 the frontnatter covers the whole page width, and is then followed by
 double column layout

 Obviously, opinions on these new FOs are very welcome! It does seem
 to me that they are necessary for minimal support of common typesetting
 practice, and cannot be achieved at present without the full complex
 page flow objects (which I do not look forward to trying to implement
 in TeX!)

I will add support for

 (declare-characteristic page-number-format
      "UNREGISTERED::James Clark//Characteristic::page-number-format" "1")
 (declare-characteristic page-number-restart?
      "UNREGISTERED::James Clark//Characteristic::page-number-restart?" #f)
 (declare-characteristic page-balance-columns?
      "UNREGISTERED::James Clark//Characteristic::page-balance-columns?" #f)

when I get time.

You can see the effect of all this in the file test.pdf in the CTAN
macros/jadetex/beta location, and in addition a demonstration of moderately
interesting math. I hesitate to put the RTF equivalent up, as the math
is um, er, not very good.

as ever when i write these messages: ``sorry no I still do not have the tables
right'' - don't try those Shakespeare plays [1]

Sebastian Rahtz


[1] or indeed, SIGH, reverse of title pages with docbook, as the .dsl for that
uses a table.

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