[racket-dev] Scribble output changes

At Fri, 05 Aug 2011 19:54:07 -0400, Prabhakar Ragde wrote:
> For what it's worth, I found the documentation on tables largely 
> incomprehensible, and could not get them to render through LaTeX without 
> everything all mushed together.

I agree.

(As it happens, if I had continued working on Scribble today, then
easy-to-use options/variants for cell spacing and borders would have
been my next change --- or, at least, so I thought at the point that I
shifted to other things.)

> Apropos of which, I don't know how to produce pure raw LaTeX code from 
> within Scribble. I can usually cheat with things like
> 
> (make-element
>      (make-style "begin" '(exact-chars)) ...)
> 
> or (make-style "relax" ...), but for LaTeX package macros that parse one 
> of their arguments more exactly (where wrapping the argument in 
> \relax{...} will not work), I have to resort to building what I want at 
> a high enough level that I can wrap it all in \relax without LaTeX 
> getting upset. I feel like I'm pretty much doing what the LaTeX renderer 
> does, but trying to stay within a higher-level API. If we want Scribble 
> to be a LaTeX replacement but still render through LaTeX, it might need 
> more thinking as to how to provide access in a Rackety fashion.

I agree with all that, too. It sounds like you're doing the right
experiments to figure out what the better interface should be!