Re: [NTG-context] \halign

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:16:06AM -0500, Eythan Weg wrote:

Wolfgang Schuster Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:20:01 +0100

Am 24.02.2011 um 17:56 schrieb Eythan Weg:

...

Hi,

I have just installed beta.

The line:

\starttext \halign{&\hfil#\hfil\quad\cr This& That\cr1&2\cr} \stoptext

is not typeset and the & are left in place. What could be the problem?

Since a while ^, _ and & can be used in text mode like any other character.

You can disable this with \donknuthmode at the begin of your document or use the \aligntab where you would normally use & but the best thing is to use one of contexts build in table environment.

Wolfgang

Thank you. I think that \halign, being a primitive of tex, should be respected. If a user wants to use it, it should be usable unconditionally.

I've no idea from where you came with this impression, is is usually the other way around; people are advised not to use low level TeX code where context has higher level interfaces, else you are on your own and should be aware of the implications/side effects. I, for one, grateful that I know longer need to escape regular characters in my documents just to keep supporting some obscure TeX feature. Regards, Khaled -- Khaled Hosny Egyptian Arab