[ILUG] text flow tools

[Brian Foster]

  | Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 21:19:24 +0000
  | From: Paul Biggar <paul.biggar at gmail.com>
  | 
  | grep can find two words one after the other by doing 'grep "word1
  | word2"'. Does anybody know a way of making this return a case where
  | word1 is at the end of one line, and word2 is at the start of the
  | next.

 one easy(?) solution is to use GNU awk:

   gawk -vRS='' '/word1[[:space:]\n]+word2/'

 not sure if that will work with other AWKs or not.
 note, however, the above prints the entire (La)TeX
 paragraph — I'm assuming here yer paragraphs are
 separated by empty lines (and not, e.g., \par) —
 that contains the two adjacent words, not just the
 one or two lines containing the words.

 a more sophisticated AWK script can be written to
 print just the one or two lines.

  | On a similar note, I'm looking for a diff/merge tool that takes the
  | flow of a paragraph into account. I'm trying to merge two slightly
  | different copies of the same latex document. I saw texdiff, but its
  | not exactly what I'm looking for, which would be more like a the
  | standard diff tool. I also looked at wdiff, but it doesn't really
  | merge things, and looks like it will be hard to use. Can anyone
  | suggest better?

 hum.  since all unescaped whitespace is the same to
 (La)TeX, you could, perhaps, put each word (which is
 not in a %comment) on a separate line, and then just
 use diff(1)?  the result would not be very friendly
 to human editors ....  ;-(

 b.t.w., where is `texdiff'?  I have never heard of it.

cheers!
	-blf-
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