LaTeX output improvements

[ghc-mirror]

Original reporter: mmitar@

I tried to use LaTeX output and it seems as a good step forward. But there are still some rough edges. Here are some suggestions:

• decouple main tex file with one more include so that it is possible to include whole package into another tex file, together with prologue, so one file with prologue and list of all sub-modules, and another which wraps it up and creates full document
• allow to specify page width, currently even if I use landscape page orientation and wider page types and module exports are still wrapped at original (internal) page width
• using article class does not seem to work without errors, together with that it would be useful to be able to disable empty pages
• wrapping of function types into multiple lines is strange and consumes too much lines, wouldn't it be better that types are normally wrapped at the end of the line and not that it is tried to wrap them at the beginning (thus using only one type per line until the rest comes into whole line)
• the same goes for export list, sometimes it just wraps into multiple, multiple lines, maybe changing this into normal tabular format (everything after :: is just a tabular cell) will also remove requirement to hard-code page width (suggestion above), so that whole text positioning would be done by LaTeX and not preprocessed (this is especially important when you want to include LaTeX output into some other document, like appendix for example)
• support for same style as lhs2TeX (using special characters to represent '::', '->' and others)

[ghc-mirror]

Original reporter: marlowsd@

Thanks for the suggestions. I developed the LaTeX backend to the point where it generating the right output for the Haskell Report, but I don't expect to have any time to develop it further. Please feel free to send patches for any of the issues you raised and I'd be happy to review them.

Also it would help a lot if you could post examples the demonstrate the problems, so we can test any fixes.

[ghc-mirror]

Original reporter: mmitar@

I throw an eye on the code but it is just too complex for me to grasp it easily. I do not know if I will have time to go into it more deeply.

Everything above can be seen when trying to make a LaTeX documentation out of my NXT library.