[XeTeX] tabular in footnote

[John Was]

Hello

I use plain XeTeX, and thanks to scholars of ancient philosophy who like to 
have huge footnotes (sometimes including tabular matter or extensive 
workings in formal logic) I do sometimes have to specify that certain groups 
of lines cannot split between pages.  Within tabular I just have 
\noalign{\nobreak} between the lines of the table that aren't to be split, 
and if a whole table was to be regarded as non-splittable I suppose I would 
put it all within vertical box:  \vbox{TABLE IN HERE}.

Wordy commands can always be reduced for quickness in typing, for example:

\def\nbr{\noalign{\nobreak}} would let you type \nbr between tabular lines 
that aren't to be split.

Do TeX primitives like that not work in LaTeX?

Best wishes


John



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Greenhoe" <dgreenhoe at gmail.com>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: 04 December 2011 12:26
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] tabular in footnote


> Hi Zdenek,
>
> As usual, thank you for all your hard work on my behalf. The
> conclusion appears to be that there is no easy solution to the problem
> (and it seems I am about the only person who has this problem).
>
> If you do happen to come upon a solution some day, please feel free to
> drop me a line. In the mean time I can maybe just tolerate the 2mm or
> so overflow, or put a newline after the table.
>
> Thank you again,
> Dan
>
> 2011/12/4 Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>:
>> Hi Dan,
>> first, as Keith wrote, as a reader I would not expect a table in a
>> footnote. If the table is important, why not to put it to the main
>> text? And if it is not important, why it is there at all? If it is of
>> less importance, it should rather appear in an apendix, not in a
>> footnote.
>>
>> I am not such an expert. I tried to figure out how the page is
>> completed but I do not fully understand it. What is important to know
>> is that each box has 3 dimensions: height, depth and width. If tabular
>> is set, the resulting box has zero height. You can see it in my
>> example. You can also se a trick how I forced it to have nonzero
>> height but preserving the sum of the height + depth. The boxes are
>> treated differently depending whether they are inserted to the
>> vertical or horizontal list.
>>
>> I am afraid that proper treatment of tables within footnotes will
>> require delving into the TeX page breaking algorithm and detailed
>> knowledge of LaTeX \output routine may also be needed. The LaTeX
>> \output is about 40 pages of code and I have never studied these
>> macros.
>>
>> 2011/12/4 Keith J. Schultz <keithjschultz at web.de>:
>>> Hi Dan,
>>>
>>> Though, you problem is interesting, but I can believe you have this
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> You do realize that a footnote in general is not intend to contain this 
>>> kind of
>>> information. Even though it may be possible in TeX, et al.
>>>
>>> Most writers show poor style by stuffing all kinds of information in the 
>>> footnote
>>> because they do not take the time to properly integrate what the have to 
>>> say into the main
>>> text.
>>>
>>> But, you can do whatever you want.
>>>
>>> regards
>>> Keith.
>>>
>>> Am 04.12.2011 um 00:31 schrieb Daniel Greenhoe:
>>>
>>>> When I put a tabular in a footnote, the tabular often is extended
>>>> outside the text area. Besides placing a newline directive after the
>>>> tabular environment, is there anything I can do to prevent this
>>>> behavior? That is, how can I best ensure that tabulars in a footnote
>>>> get typeset completely within the text area? Here is an example:
>>>>
>>>> \documentclass[12pt]{book}
>>>> \usepackage[xetex,a4paper,noheadfoot,nomarginpar,margin=20mm,showframe]{geometry}
>>>> \begin{document}%
>>>> xyz\footnote{%
>>>> %\raisebox{2.5mm}{
>>>> \begin{tabular}[t]{|l|}
>>>> \hline
>>>> abc\\
>>>> def\\
>>>> ghj\\
>>>> klm\\
>>>> \hline
>>>> \end{tabular}%\\
>>>> %}%
>>>> }
>>>> xyz\footnote{%
>>>> %\raisebox{2.5mm}{
>>>> \begin{tabular}[t]{|l|}
>>>> \hline
>>>> abc\\
>>>> def\\
>>>> ghj\\
>>>> klm\\
>>>> \hline
>>>> \end{tabular}%\\
>>>> %}%
>>>> }
>>>> \end{document}%
>>>>
>>>> Many thanks in advance,
>>>> Dan
>>>> <foottbl.tex><foottbl.pdf>
>>>>
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>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> Zdeněk Wagner
>> http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
>> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
>>
>>
>>
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>
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