New LaTeX Writer

The new LaTeX writer (newlatex2e) is in active development. These are development notes -- edit ahead! Ultimately, they will be moved to the global to-do list, but while newlatex2e is incomplete, they remain here.

• It appears that all visit_ methods can be turned into before_ methods (and renamed thereafter).

• Also pass raw text (foo_bar) and not only renderable text (foo{_}bar). See http://article.gmane.org/gmane.text.docutils.user/2516.

• Try the commands mentioned in <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=c7opho%248ts%241%40wsc10.lrz-muenchen.de>.

• <http://www.tug.org/applications/pdftex/pdfTeX-FAQ.pdf>:

  3.1.6. How can I make a document portable to both latex and pdflatex
  Contributed by: Christian Kumpf
  Check for the existence of the variable \pdfoutput:
  \newif\ifpdf
  \ifx\pdfoutput\undefined
  \pdffalse % we are not running PDFLaTeX
  \else
  \pdfoutput=1 % we are running PDFLaTeX
  \pdftrue
  \fi
  Then use your new variable \ifpdf
  \ifpdf
  \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
  \pdfcompresslevel=9
  \else
  \usepackage{graphicx}
  \fi
  

• Need to get some simple docinfo field handling. Move language look-up logic to nodes.py? Same for admonitions.

• Footnotes should be placed on the same page as their references. However, there may be multiple references per footnote, so we'll probably need an option and some sophisticated handling for this.

• Make sure we don't break ligatures (and possibly hyphenation) with zealous brace protection. See http://article.gmane.org/gmane.text.docutils.user/2586.

• Tables inside of footnotes have too large vertical margins. Need a "reduced vertical margin" mode, maybe?

• There's not enough vertical space between fields:

  :Name:
      Paragraph.
      Paragraph.
  :Name:
      Paragraph.
      Paragraph.
  

• Another edge case with too much vertical margin:

  +--------------------+
  | :Name:             |
  |     Paragraph.     |
  | :Name:             |
  |     Paragraph.     |
  +--------------------+
  

• We want to support underscores in citation references, they need to appear unescaped.

• If there's raw code between paragraphs, it gets appended to the last paragraph unless we do \par. That's a little bit ugly. Can we fix this? (Change paragraph handling maybe?)

• Test that, say, all Latin 1 characters are renderable. (And possibly test more characters.)