Using Comment notes the right way

Daniel xracoonx at gmx.de
Tue Nov 21 14:55:48 UTC 2023


On 2023-11-21 12:17, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
> Le 21/11/2023 à 07:54, Daniel a écrit :
>> I see. But my point was that I don't think that it is specific to my 
>> use case. The reason being that the comment feature is a default 
>> feature found in many applications these days and that this indicates 
>> a quite general usefulness of it.
> 
> As I wrote before, the main feature that would make me like a new 
> comment inset would be to be able to show the name and color of the user 
> who entered it when some in change tracking mode. Having a comment 
> feature that is linked to the change tracking machinery would be good. 
> The issue of knowing how to typeset them, though, is not that easy.

I am not sure which specificity of implementation you are after. But the 
pdfcomment package supports the "author=..." option for individual 
comments (as well as the "color=..." option).

> I also want to point out that Comment notes (mentionned in the subject 
> of the thread) have nothing to do with that. These are just notes that 
> are visible in the document source, but not typeset. This is in contrast 
> with plain notes, that are not exported at all. This question of having 
> this potentially private information present or not in the .tex file is 
> more important IMO than having it visible to the end user.
>  > Finally, my remark about "MSWord in a box" was undeserved, and I
> apologize for that. I should have fought a bit more the urge of making 
> fun of the idea. However, if allowing free spacing in comments is 
> considered a worthy feature (after all everybody else does that), then 
> why not allow it everywhere then? Everybody has its own habits, after 
> all, and I am sure some people would enjoy this.

I think not allowing free spacing and empty lines in the main text is 
helpful because it indicates what is going on in the output. Double 
spaces and extra empty lines will be swallowed by LaTeX.

The idea with comments was that since they are not typeset that way, it 
might make sense to allow for more freedom of how to enter stuff. So 
that seems to be an important difference.

But I see now that things are not as easy as they seemed to me at first. 
Because one might see not being able to enter extra spaces and empty 
lines not only as related to the output but as help to avoid them in 
general. Maybe that is one of your concerns?

If the pdfcomment package is used for output, I would highly recommend 
allowing for more freedom in spacing (something that the module lacks) 
since it only supports plain text as far as I can see.

Daniel



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