[metapost] verbatimtex... etex after mpost 1.210

[Daniel Luecking]

On Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 1:03 pm, Taco Hoekwater <taco at elvenkind.com> wrote:

> Subject: Re: [metapost] verbatimtex... etex after mpost 1.210
> To: Nicola <nvitacolonna at gmail.com>
> Cc: metapost at tug.org
> 
> > After thinking about it, I would suggest instead that the 
> whitespace *on 
> > the same line* of *every* occurrence of verbatimtex be removed, 
> up to 
> > the first new-line (included) or to the first non-space character 
> (not 
> > included). 
> 
> Assuming there is agreement. It makes sense to me, but ...

I am in agreement.  I cannot think of a situation where this 
would produce unintended behavior. Except for, perhaps,  
the case of a comment character, but it is actually unclear 
to me what a user might intend by that.

One of the problems so far has been that the behavior (of 
first and last lines) has not been documented at all. I think 
almost any reasonable behavior would be OK, as long as 
it is precisely specified and documented.

By the way, I have forgotten what was decided about
the white space at the end (just before etex). That 
should surely be stripped in btex's but is useful to keep in 
verbatimtex's. The version I currently have (1.211 from TeXLive
2010) strips it and appends a "%". I can live with either 
behavior, but it should be documented also.

Finally, if it turns out there are problems with the this 
proposal, it might then be useful to have a separate 
way to specify just the header line (or lines) of the TeX file.

Regards,
Dan

-- 
Daniel H. Luecking
Mathematical Sciences
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, Arkansas