\hidewidth is a plain tex thing that is unlikely to work well with other code

With all respect, I do not understand why it can cause problems and "is unlikely to work well". It is no surprise that in TeX you can cause havoc by using things unwisely or in the wrong place (and I have enough experience with this;-). By using things the burden to use them well falls onto the programmer, of course. Given \hidewidth's body is \hskip\hideskip: \hskip I would sorely miss and \hideskip is nothing more than a register set by Knuth to -1000pt plus1fill. I am open for further enlightment and not too old to learn. yours sincerely dr. Hans van der Meer

On 16 Jul 2023, at 14:08, Hans Hagen via ntg-context wrote:

On 7/16/2023 1:31 PM, Hans van der Meer via ntg-context wrote:

...

What happened to \hidewidth? It looks as if it disappeared. See the accompanying MWE. However, searching the ConTeXt source I find it used in enco-ini.mkiv, defined in syst-ini.mkiv, but commented out in syst-ini.mkxl. Why is that? It seems a harmless definition, and its body is even used twice in enco-ini.mkxl. I dare say, with all due respect, it is not pleasant (and a waste of time) to find working code suddenly broken because of leftout macro's. And I feel lucky to not having used \ialign, because something similar happened to it. \hidewidth is a plain tex thing that is unlikely to work well with other code

\ialign is also something plain and as it sets everycr as well as tabskip and also can interfere

you can define these macros yourself and hope for the best wrt interference but i'm not going to look into such interferences

Hans

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