On Mon, Mar 09, 2026 at 07:05:22PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> Could spaces at the start of a line be placed in their own element?
>
> Input:
> aaaaaaaaaa
> bbbbbbbbbbb
>
> This parses as:
> *paragraph C2
> {aaaaaaaaaa\n}
> { bbbbbbbbbbb\n}
>
>
> The leading spaces are included with the "bbbbbbbbbbb" text.
>
> This makes a difference when the trailing newline is commented out:
>
> aaaaaaaaaa@c
> bbbbbbbbbbb
>
> This should be output in Info as "aaaaaaaaaabbbbbbbbbbb" to match the
> TeX output,
This looks both wrong and unexpected to me.
> but instead is output as "aaaaaaaaaa bbbbbbbbbbb".
which looks fine.
> TeX has a general rule of skipping leading whitespace on a line.
Again, this seems unexpected to me. I do not think that it is a good
thing to go in that direction.
> I propose that spaces after a new line should be marked specially more
> generally, not just in a braced command argument.
Spaces after a new line are marked specially if they are leading spaces
of a paragraph, as it is an interesting informatio to have for paragraph
fisrt line indentation. But otherwise, I don't see a reason to mark
spaces after a new line specially, as I can't see a good reason to make
them special in general.
--
Pat
