>> Like I say, after hacking away at it for years, they've got it to
>> sort-of work, most of the time. That's not the same as TeX *actually*
>> supporting these things.
>
> of course not, that is not how it works. You use packages if you want to
> do something other than basic typesetting.

If TeX had been /designed/ to support such things, they would work far 
more reliably. (And you would probably be able to do things like /query/ 
what the current colour is, set a new colour relative to the old one, etc.)

>> Yes. They're kludged in the same way as colour and graphics.
>
> Kludged?
> People spend a lot of time creating packages for you to use without you
> having to understand the details.

They worked around the limitations as best as they could. They did quite 
well, considering. But it's still not the same as having real support 
for something.

>> ...something...? Perhaps it is not only me that fails English. ;-)
>
> sorry was distracted and didn't notice I didn't finish the sentence.

Ditto. ;-)

>> Well, that's what it *is*. It's a program that converts your markup into
>> something that looks nice.
>
> nope. It is a programming environment that happens to create documents
> as a side effect. ;)

If by "programming environment" you mean "text macro processor" then 
yes. Technically, PostScript is a Turing-complete programming language 
which optionally creates printed pages too. ;-)

>> I merely wanted to create a new tabbing environment where all the text
>> comes out green, set one quad in from both margins. (Apparently there's
>> no way to prevent it flowing off the right edge of the page though...)
>>
>> First I found that only the /first/ line came out green. So then I added
>> a group around the body. That worked fine... until the environment went
>> over a page break, at which point it broke again. Not to mention that by
>> flipping from page to page, I actually managed to break the DVI viewer
>> as well. (At one point the entire document turned green, just by me
>> manipulating the view...)
>
> So is TeX to blame or your DVI viewer?

The problem is that the DVI format (which TeX invented) doesn't really 
support colour, and neither does TeX itself. They managed to hack 
support for it into TeX and the DVI format, but it's not very reliable.

In a sense, DVI is just the preview. The final document is almost always 
PDF. But even the PDF version had colouring gone wrong. Like, if the 
environment broke over a page, the page number at the bottom turned 
green, and the running heading on the text page, but then all the rest 
of the text was black. Short of embedding a colour mark at the beginning 
of every line, I'm not sure how to fix that...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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