soft returns and TOC extraction

["Bob Brody" rabrody@xxxxxxxx]

Setting up XyWin for "soft carriage return support," heretofore
referred to as "alternate line ending" in Xy III+, I notice a
significant change in this feature. Or, there's something else I
have to do in setting this up.

It works as it's supposed to. I mapped my Shift-Enter for soft
carriage return and seemingly broken lines remain as one
paragraph when I use the soft return to manually break the line.
If I for instance then select paragraph (F4), the whole block is
selected as one paragraph even though it has line breaks. So the
feature itself works fine.

However, something is rotten in Denmark when it comes to creating
tables of contents or indexes. I'm particularly interested in
the tables of contents aspect.

In Xy III+, and according to the XyWin manual as well, when you
place a table marker at the outset of a line of text, it will
include the entire line in the table extraction, up to the
carriage return. That's the key part in this, "up to the
carriage return."

So a line marked thusly:

≪X2≫Here is a phrase for the table of contents.

Will result in a table extraction something like:

   Here is a phrase for the table of contents ............. 12

and so forth. The full line of text extracts to the table of
contents, and is page numbered of course, because the ≪Xn≫ table
marker is at the beginning of the text as illustrated above.

Fine. But in Xy III+, if that line of text ends with a *soft*
carriage return instead of a hard return, and looks something like
this:

≪X2≫Here is a phrase for the table of contents 

along with some text context beneath it.

Then the table extraction looks like this:

   Here is a phrase for the table of contents

   along with some text context beneath it ............... 12

As you can see, because the entry is created with a soft return,
and because the table extraction will include all text up to the
carriage return, the additional line(s) also become part of the
extraction *because* they end with a soft return, which by
definition is not supposed to be considered a normal carriage
return. That's the point of having/using a soft return.

So in Xy III+ this is handled properly. However, in XyWin, the
table extraction is *ignoring* the soft return and treating it
same as if it were a hard return. It's not supposed to do that.
Has somebody informed it that it's not supposed to do that?

Consequently, this is what happens:

≪X2≫Here is a phrase for the table of contents 

along with some text context beneath it.

when TOC extracted in XyWin:

   Here is a phrase for the table of contents ........ 12

As you can see, the soft return is ignored and treated as if it
were a normal carriage return (no doubt hurting the feelings of
the soft return since even wp features don't like to be ignored).

If this is a glitch it should be fixed. Certainly shoots to hell
my screenplay report routine since my camera and scene shots now
no longer extract with context. Whence once I'd get:

INT. POLICE STATION - NIGHT

Sally kicks Sergeant Reynolds in the balls .............. 13

Now all I get is:

INT. POLICE STATION - NIGHT ............................. 13

even though the scene setup and subsequent text in the script are
*deliberately* broken via soft return so I'd have context with
the table extraction. Unfortunately I can't just toss the file
into Xy III+ to do the table extraction, and get the proper
output, because III+ errors on some of the XyWin embeds, such as
RG=1, etc.

Perhaps this is a minor oversight in tables extraction which
could be fixed in a maintenance release or maybe a patch. I
should add that I tried setting up the soft return to display no
character (an alternate approach as discussed in the XyWin
manual) thinking maybe if there were *no* character at the end of
the line, the extraction would continue on same as it does for
normal paragraphs that word wrap/break via soft return. No luck.
Still doesn't work.

Bob