layout question

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2022-07-27 at 15:32:54 -0700, Walt Burkhard wrote:

 > Hello,
 > I would like to have a row with almost no entries but I cannot seem
 > to get the last vrule to show up where it should be.

Hi Walt,
you wrote

  &&\bf present &&\multispan{14}\vrule\cr

but \multispan takes two arguments, the number of colunms to span and
the content of this "supercolumn".  Please try this:

  &&\bf present &&\multispan{14}{\hfill}\vrule\cr

In your case \multispan took \vrule as a second argument and placed it
at the very left, next to the \vrule after "\bf present" which was
already inserted by the template.

I used pdftex for testing.

>From your example file I deduce that you are teaching German.  It then
makes more sense to switch to LuaTeX or XeTeX and use UTF-8 as an
input encoding.  The reason is that if you type \"o in plain TeX the
letter ö is produced by combining o and the dieresis.  (Negative)
kerning is used for proper horizontal positioning.  But an explicit
\kern denotes a word boundary and thus prevents many possible
hyphenation points due to \lefthyphenmin and \righthyphenmin.

In order to get proper hyphenation the font has to supply characters
with dieresis as single glyphs and with distinct code points so that
no explicit \kern is needed.

It's also more convenient to use German characters instead of TeX
macros in your TeX input file.  Operating systems and good text
editors allow you to select a proper "input method" for a particular
language.  When I select VIQR as an input method for Vietnamese I can
type "Ha` No^.i" on my German keyboard and immediately see "Hà Nội" on
screen.  It's always a pleasure to see how fast Chinese type Chinese
on a German keyboard.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                    mailto:reinhard.kotucha at gmx.de
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