Dekel Tsur wrote:
>
> On Thu, Apr 27, 2000 at 12:21:52PM +0200, Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote:
> > Jean-Marc Lasgouttes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> > | Lars> It does not buy anything other than 19 bytes saved.
>
> But you can have many protected spaces in one document.
> For example, the reference manual contains 1012 p. spaces, so the cost is
> 19228 bytes, or ~6% of the length of the file!
>
> > | It buys us a somewhat more coherent file format (roughly
> > | latex-based).
> >
> > And we will probably move away from latex and towards something like
> > <protected-space/> (or perhaps a short variant <pb/> )
>
> We had this discussion some time ago, and everybody agreed that we should use
> "\SpecialChar ~" instead of "\SpecialChar \protected_separator"
On the one hand, I'm comforted to hear that somebody besides me has to
resort to protected spaces, OTOH, I think they suck, like ERT. I have
yet to use one in a document that I personally wrote from scratch. Each,
I think, indicates something lacking. As an example, I have poets who
number stanzas or groups thereof, and I would like to center the stanza
number over the stanza or group. Center usually places it too far to the
right. I could probably work around that problem by using a minipage the
the width of the longest line in the poem and centering in the minipage,
but it is somewhat trial an error to determine how wide the minipage
needs to be.
But I agree the ~ is a lot more economical than \protected_separator
\Garst
