Layout issues

As a general rule, TeXmacs takes care of the layout of your text. Therefore, although we did not want to forbid this possibility, we do not encourage you to typeset your document visually. For instance, you should not insert spaces or blank lines as substitutes for horizontal and vertical spaces between words and lines; instead, additional space should be inserted explicitly using InsertSpace. This will make your text more robust in the sense that you will not have to reconsider the layout when performing some minor changes, which affect line or page breaking, or major changes, such as changing the document style.

Several types of explicit spacing commands have been implemented. First of all, you can insert rigid spaces of given widths and heights. Horizontal spaces do not have a height and are either stretchable or not. The length of a stretchable spaces depends on the way a paragraph is hyphenated. Furthermore, it is possible to insert tabular spaces. Vertical spaces may be inserted either at the start or the end of a paragraph: the additional vertical space between two paragraphs is the maximum of the vertical space after the first one and the vertical space before the second one (contrary to TeX, this prevents from superfluous space between two consecutive theorems).

As to the paragraph layout, the user may specify the paragraph style (justified, left ragged, centered or right ragged), the paragraph margins and the left (resp. right) indentation of the first (resp. last) line of a paragraph. The user also controls the spaces between paragraphs and successive lines in paragraphs.

You can specify the page layout in the DocumentPage menu. First of all, you can specify the way pages are displayed on the screen: when selecting “paper” as page type in DocumentPageType, you explicitly see the page breaks. By default, the page type is “papyrus”, which avoids page breaking during the preparation of your document. The “automatic” page type assumes that your paper size is exactly the size of your window. The page margins and text width are specified in DocumentPageLayout. Often, it is convenient to reduce the page margins for usage on the screen; this can be done in DocumentPageScreen layout.

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