[OS X TeX] Geometry package, lists and hfill weirdness

[Frank STENGEL]

Le 15 oct. 07 à 15:34, Charilaos Skiadas a écrit :

<snip>

>
> So two questions:
> 1. Is this a known behavior of the geometry package, and do you  
> know of a way to circumvent it?

Actually no: what geometry does is change the (logical) paper  
margins. The fact is that on an A4 sheet, article uses rather large  
margins. So in any case the ``there!'' are truly placed at the right  
margin. What you may want to do is add a \hbox{} after the hfill so  
that the skip (hfill) is not gobbled (unskipped) when the line is cut.

Actually what happens (more or less) is that when TeX cuts a line it  
kills any white space (stretchable or no) at the end of the line. If  
this line is the last line of a paragraph, it adds the glue  
(stretchable space) defined in \parfillskip, which here is equivalent  
to a \hfil (one l, infinitely less springy than a \hfill) So you end  
up with single line paragraphs of the form:

<left margin> \hfill Hi \hfill There! \hfil <right margin>

The \hfil being weak, it will be smashed by the \hfills therefore  
giving the impression of:

<left margin> \hfill Hi \hfill There! <right margin>

> 2. How can I make the \filltwo calls in the enumerate environment  
> distribute their arguments equidistant in a single line?

Try this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[left=1cm,right=1cm,top=1cm,bottom=1cm]{geometry}
\newcommand{\filltwo}[2]{\par\hfill #1 \hfill {#2} \hfill\hbox{}}
\begin{document}
   \begin{enumerate}
     \item In list:\par
     \hfill Hi \hfill there! \hfill\hbox{}
     \item Also in list:
     \filltwo{Hi}{there!}
   \end{enumerate}
   %Another way would be to use hfil
   \par\hfil Hi \hfil there!\par % notice, no tailing \hfil, it is  
added by \parfillskip...
   \filltwo{Hi}{there!}
\end{document}

Another way would be to use boxes such as :

\hbox to 10cm{\hfill Hi \hfill There! \hfill}

HTH

-- 
Frank STENGEL (fstengel<at>mac.com)


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