Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!djmcclur
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
From: djmcclur@cs.toronto.edu ("David J. McClurkin")
Subject: an interesting problem
Message-ID: <90Dec5.204808est.6898@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: 6 Dec 90 01:48:48 GMT
Lines: 40


There are 2 things that I need to be able to do, and I'm
hoping that some knowledgeable TeX user will be able to help me.

1) I need to create a macro that will display text as follows:

        |<----- preceeding text goes from here to here -------------->|

        Both of these boxes contain         The right boundary
        flush left text.                    of this box (i.e. the right
	The left margin of this             end of the longest line)
        box is aligned with                 is aligned with the
        the normal left                     normal right margin.
        margin

The problem seems to be that one cannot create a vbox or parbox whose
width is simply that of the longest line inside (its "natural" width).

2) I want to use headings that look like:

   4.1 This is the Heading.  This is the following text of the section...

by using a command like

   \subsection{This is the Heading}
   (blank line here)
   This is the following text...

In other words I need to be able to skip over blank lines between
the \subsection command and the actual text of the subsection, without
beginning a new paragraph.  \ignorespaces doesn't seem to ignore
carriage returns, just space tokens.  Is there an analog that will
ignore carriage returns as well; of can we redefine the catcode for
cr and somehow return it to normal when the actual text of the
subsection begins?

I'm hoping that the answers to both questions are trivial.
Thanks in advance for helping me.

Dave McClurkin