Re: [boost] Any (La)TeX experts here?

From: Christoph Ludwig (cludwig_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-08-16 18:28:25

On Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 04:03:30PM -0400, Daryle Walker wrote:
> (Some of the) Problems I see:

There's a diff at
<url:http://www.cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/~cludwig/boost/HyperComplex.diff>
that fixes or works around the problems below.

> 1.  I had to bump the author's e-mail and web addresses to a footnote
> instead of putting them in the main title-page text.  (lines 5-7 in the
> *.tex file)

I am not so sure I understood what you want. Setting the two URLs centerd
below the author's name is certainly no problem. (I decided to set them
somewhat smaller than the author's name. If you don't like that remove the
\small in front of the URLs.) I set the URLs with... the \url command. :-)
That way you don't need to worry about special characters etc.

> 2.  There's no space between a \set? macro and the next word, outside of
> math formulas.  (lots of places)

That's cured by adding \xspace in the appropriate command definitions.

> 3.  The element multiplication table isn't centered, nor does it have any
> space above & below it separating it from the main text.  (lines 213-224)

You want the table to be "displayed". Therefore I put the table inside a
display environment. (align* fom the amsmath package, but other environments
would have worked as well.) And in math mode you need to use the array
environment rather than tabular.

> 4.  The 16-element tuples aren't line-broken, so they could overflow the
> column.  (lines 244-248, 631-633)

Here I applied a dirty hack: I defined a command that inserts a comma followed
by a (non mandatory) \linebreak. It is possible to define a command \tuple
that allows linebreaks after commas even within parentheses, similar to the
\url command. But I am not familiar enough with the required low level TeX to
come up with a quick solution.

> 5.  Some function blocks are inline with the text instead of put into a
> separate row by themselves.  (lines 273-275, 451-456, 661-663)

That's essentially the same as (3). I'd prefer to keep function definitions on
one line, but that's up to you. I also don't like the itemized formulas
(pp. 16, 17). I'd rather employ the display and alignment environments from
amsmath. But I did not want to change too much.

> 6.  Many equations involving large matrices overflow the column.  (lines
> 290-298, 321-328, 567-589, 591-613, 1442-1461)

Here I did not find any better solution than to typeset the matrices in
\scriptstyle. In some cases it might be better to pull the nontrivial terms
out of the matrix, i.e.
\begin{align*}
  M &=
  \begin{bmatrix}
    A & B & C \\
    D & E & F \\
    G & H & J
  \end{bmatrix}
  \intertext{where}
  A &= \alpha^2 + \beta^2 - \gamma^2 - \delta^2\\
  B &= -2\alpha\delta + 2\beta\gamma\\
  % and so on
\end{align*}  
Then the matrix can probably be set in its natural size.

I made some more minor modifications: I replaced the standard math blackboard
bold font with the doublestroke font I like much better for the set symbols. I
changed the hyperref options such that hyperlinks are no longer in frame boxes
with colored frames but in colored font. The frames interferred with the
surrounding text and made it harder to read. And, finally, I added
\texorpdfstring to the title of section 2.4 to suppress the annoying warnings
"Token not allowed in a PDFDocEncoded string".

The document still offers many opportunities to improve its typesetting but I
think I covered the most glaring points.

HTH

Christoph

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