[mgp-users 01200] Re: MGP Preprocessor Details; release soon!

[David Ronis <ronis@flu-guest-pc.eng.tau.ac.il>]

While the super/subscript feature would be nice, as well as the
ability to format blocks of text, change fonts etc. within a given
line, this is all trivially available using the filter command and the
formatter of your choice.  I use groff and it produces super tables,
equations, blocks of text, etc..  

Frankly, unless the goal is a fully self-contained WSWYG GUI for
producing a presentation, I'd rather have access a fully developed
formatter like TeX or groff than some primitive substitute, especially
with yet another syntax for producing tables (tables are NEVER fun to
lear how to do).

What might be nice would be to have a dedicated formatter command
(hopefully one for TeX and one for groff) that would eliminate the
need for filtering through scripts that add header and footer
boilerplate needed by the formatters.  Of course, the filter scripts
have the advantage that they are easily customizable for a given
installation.  

Perhaps more important is a more developed mark and return system.
For example, I would like to be able to mark different positions on a
page and return to them in any order I like.  Similarly, spacing
commands for vertical and or horizontal space would be
nice--especially if they would take their arguments in real units.

Mark Allman writes:
 > >  > (1) equation support is poor (as someone else noted, at least super
 > >  >     and subscripts would be really nice)
 > > 
 > > Hmm, is there any good free implementation of equation-rendering
 > > libraries?  If so, I'm happy to use them for mgp.
 > 
 > ???
 > 
 > >  > (2) no good way to make nice tables
 > > 
 > > Right. the only way I can come up with is using %area, like:
 > > 
 > > %size 8
 > > 1
 > > 2
 > > 3
 > > %area 10 10 10 0
 > > 4
 > > 5
 > > 6
 > > %area 10 10 20 0
 > > 7
 > > 8
 > > 9
 > 
 > Ah, yes.  But, whoa- how ugly! :)

I agree.

David