[texhax] Q: centering with known width [+ variant: numbers]

[Martin Heller]

Uwe Lück skrev:

> Concerning avoidance of extra packages: This is a mixture
> of sports, philosophy, and psychology. The psychological
> part is that I started using LaTeX with a small TeX version
> and struggled hard with "TeX capacity exceeded".
> I also find it somewhat annoying to load hundreds of
> macro definitions of which I need only half a dozen.
> (Therefore, I have used the autoload version of LaTeX
> -- I still do for tests or small passages on my
> Atari emulator TOSbox.)

On most modern TeX systems this does not occur very often.

> There is indeed a practical aspect for me somewhat
> connected with the former:  If I need a certain function
> and try to find a package for it, I must study documentations.
> The more versatile the package is, the more difficult is it
> for me to find the relevant passages in the documentation.
> Moreover, the more versatile a package is, the more their
> authors tend to explain single functions so briefly that
> I cannot see from the explanations whether the package
> does what I want. By contrast, I know what my own macros
> do (or should do, admittedly, or will do as soon I have
> debugged them).

I guess you have studied documentation in order to write your own 
macros? Even if you have to read the documentation for a given 
LaTeX package this is often much easier accessible for the 
average user than the documentation for writing plain TeX macros.