Re: Several newbie questions

Jeff,

I would like to thank you for your quick and thorough response.

>> 3) Multipage figures that are not separated by enough nonfloating
>> material tend to interleave to fill available space. Is there a way
>> around this?
>
> There are a few options associated with @Figure that might help,
> depending on the details.  You could try the @FullPage option,
> for example.  Check them out in the User's Guide.  However, it's
> an awkward area so don't expect too much.  I routinely move
> figures away from their natural anchor points to get what I want
> when there are a lot of them - in both LaTeX and in Lout.

Hopefully, this will solve itself as I have more text to move around
these figures. However, what I forgot to say was that issue is not
whole figures changing order, but parts of figures appearing inside
other figures to fill unused space. I get the first two components
from figure one followed by the first component of figure two on one
page and then component three of figure one on next page etc.

>> 6) I like tbl package, but would like to emulate rules from booktabs
>> LaTeX package
>> +("http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/booktabs/").
>> I can imagine changing spacing and line widths to match \toprule,
>> \midrule and \bottomrule, but I have no idea how to do left/right side
>> shortening of \cmidline(lr)[]. Is there any way to make horizontal
>> rules a bit shorter on one or both sides?
>
> I'm not familiar with the LaTeX package you mention, and I'm not
> sure what you are asking for.  If you are trying to avoid having
> rules projecting out the side of the table, use
>
>    aformat { @Cell ml { 0i } A | ... | @Cell mr { 0i } F }
>
> This removes the left margin from the first cell and the right
> margin from the last cell, so that there is nothing for the
> rule to stick out over.

The \cmidline command I'm trying to emulate is used to group columns
together visually using a rule below. This is easy to do with the tbl
package, but I also needs to shorten the rule on one or both sides to
separate one column group from other column groups by a gap between
rules.

>> 8) The diag package is great and I was able to do things that were
>> hard to do in tikz/pgf quite easily. However, I have not been able to
>> find a built-in way to colour edges. I have eventually hacked diag
>> package to add colour to edges, but I may have missed something.
>
> I see that @Link etc. don't have a paint option like nodes do.  I'm
> not sure why that is (did I just forget?).  However, you can write
>
>    green @Colour @Arrow from { ... } to { ... }
>
> instead.  You can also colour the whole diagram:  green @Colour @Diag
> ...

Now that I know it should have worked, I can see why @Colour didn't
work for me at first. Maybe I will ask first next time. Anyway, I have
already changed the diag package to add separate colour choices for
outlines, paths and arrows using relatively minor changes. Would it be
possible/desirable to propagate these changes to the next Lout
version?

Martin