Le 2 janv. 09 à 21:49, Hans Hagen a écrit :

i'm not sure if you refer to the same kind of positional info, but pdftex (and therefore luatex) hasn pdfsavepos cum suis in both pdf and dvi mode so you can store positions (lazy, i.e. write them to file in the backend) and then use them in a second pass (it't a rather old feature by now, which started as an experiment by Thanh and me and for some time was only available in pdf mode and in dvi mode we could use specials and the dvipos postprocessor; after a while it was also added to dvi mode)

on the agenda is some more positional (runtime, in prerolls using boxes and getting pos into afterwards), a kind of pet project in parallel

Well, I'm doing mainly two things:

1) I put tags in the DVI file which allow me to place marginal material at (exactly) the same height, during post-processing. In DVI it is easy to place a PUSH, make a skip, typeset the material and then POP back to the previous position so that the rest of the page remains unchanged. I guess this will be harder in PDF.

2) I calculate the height of lines so that I can detect whether a page is shorter or taller than the normal. This is very useful to prevent accidents.

In a more elaborate project I split my DVI page into lines (lines of text, of translation, of footnotes of translation and of one or more critical apparati) and I re-assemble these lines into double pages, by letting the critical apparati flow under the footnotes, ad by keeping parallelism between text and translation. This works fine with DVI, maybe everyline can become a BT...ET section in PDF and I can get the same result.

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                            ...pour distinguer l'extérieur d'un aquarium,
                                           mieux vaut n'être pas poisson

                           ...the ball I threw while playing in the park
                                          has not yet reached the ground

              Es gab eine Zeit, wo ich nur ungern über Schubert sprechen,
           nur Nächtens den Bäumen und Sternen von ihm vorerzählen mögen.