Re: [NTG-context] setupnarrower and startnarrower

On 8/6/2013 6:14 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:

On Tue, 6 Aug 2013, Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

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Am 06.08.2013 um 17:53 schrieb Aditya Mahajan :

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On Tue, 6 Aug 2013, Wolfgang Schuster wrote:

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Am 06.08.2013 um 16:09 schrieb Alan BRASLAU :

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Thank you Wolfgang, but I was wondering about the standard \startnarrower.

Many (some) commands allow setup assignments, the use of which overides but does not change the default. This is a very useful feature of ConTeXt that suggest could be generalized. \startnarrower is but one example.

Changing the command is simple but I would drop the second argument when you want to change the left/right etc. values because you can say “left=4cm” etc. to get the desired margins.

startnarrower has a weird interface. Ideally, it should just support keywords:

\startnarrower [ leftmargin=..., rightmargin=..., alternative=(left|right|both), spacebefore=...., spaceafter=...., indenting=...., indentnext=...., before=...., after=...., ]

That’s more or less what I use for the “narrow” alternative in the annotation module.

I would prefer such a parameter driven narrower environment myself (do we even need the left, middle and right option when we can set absolute margins) but keeping the current interface for backwards compatibility make things a little bit ugly.

Haven't we broken backward compatibility for other environments as well? \startlinenumbering immediately comes to mind where the MkII interface was

\startlinenumbering[continue]

and the current interface is

\startlinenumbering[continue=yes]

I, for one, think that it is OK to break backward compatibility for more elegance and consistency.

\startnarrower with its interface is one of the oldest commands which also means that it's used in our styles however, we already have \startnarrow and i extended that one to accept a few more combinations: \showframe \definenarrower[whatever][left=3cm,right=2cm,default=left] \starttext \input ward \startnarrower[2*left] \input ward \stopnarrower \input ward \startnarrow[whatever] \input ward \stopnarrow \input ward \startnarrow[whatever][right] \input ward \stopnarrow \input ward \startnarrow[whatever][default=middle] \input ward \stopnarrow \input ward \startnarrow[whatever][default=middle,middle=-1cm] \input ward \stopnarrow \input ward \startnarrow[default=middle] \input ward \stopnarrow \input ward \stoptext ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------