Section 36.1 What to Expect

A surprising amount of a PreTeXt document survives the trip. Lists nest, with their authored numbering or markers, to any depth, and the items of a <task> subdivision nest right along with them. A <tabular> of simple cells becomes a genuine table (Section 36.2). Images appear, placed and sized according to your layout elections. Cross-references are working links, within a file and across the files of a chunked build. The index is genuine: collected, sorted, and grouped by letter, with each locator a link announcing its target (“Theorem 2.1”). Footnotes are marked in place and collected at the end of the division owning them. Program listings, console sessions, and Sage cells are code blocks, with input prompted by its language. Mathematics renders (Section 36.2).

Understand, though, that certain constructions cannot be supported, and no amount of cleverness will change this. Text is a linear medium, so there is no side-by-side layout: the panels of a <sidebyside> appear in sequence, after a note announcing the arrangement. An elaborate <tabular>—spanning cells, rules, alignment—reduces to simple rows. Interactives, video, and audio cannot function in a static text file; each is announced, with a URL when one is readily available. There are no knowls, no fonts, no color. The general principle: a construction that cannot be expressed is announced in-band by a bracketed note, in a fixed recognizable format, rather than being silently dropped.