Re: enriched-mode and switching major modes.

["Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com>]

Oliver Scholz <epameinondas@gmx.de> wrote,

    The benefit is that you do this while looking at the "surface
    expression".

Please be more precise and say `one of the surface expressions'.

Otherwise, someone may think that a particular surface expression is
prime.  This happens not only when people work on LaTeX to produce
papers that are to be printed, but with many word processing programs.

Unfortunately, even Emacs people think this way sometimes.  Yes, it is
less of a problem since people who use Emacs tend to read Texinfo
documents and know they may be printed or in Info or in HTML (or they
listen to them).  But even so, I have run into people editing a
Texinfo source file who think it is primarily for `the book', i.e.,
for printed form typeset with TeX, or for `Info'.  I have done this
myself.  I fear this tendency towards over simplification is
universal.  It needs to be fought.


Stefan <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> made the good point that 

    ... the deep representation . .. is the format where I can
    expresss my *intents*, i.e. where I can distinguish between two
    concepts even if they happen to be rendered identically on the
    currently used output mode

This is worth remembering.  One surface representation provides you
with only one way to specify your intent.  Pretty obviously, this may
not be the only intent you want to save.

Nonetheless, this intent must be incorporated into the deep
representation along with the others.  (This is all very hard to do;
and some surface representations, such as Info, simply cannot provide
all the data used by a representation such as that produced by TeX.)

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         
    bob@rattlesnake.com                         GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  http://www.teak.cc