Text Formatting ⇒ current line accessible?

[Laurentius]

Is the current line accessible in some \box ?

[Stefan Kottwitz]

For what it's desired?

I guess the current line is not easily accessible. However, with LuaTeX you could use a callback such as post_linebreak_filter to get access to the line. It would require to learn and to program a bit of Lua.

Stefan

[cgnieder]

To quote David Carlisle:

Basic answer is no. Donald Arseneau's magaz package goes to heroic lengths to apply different formatting to the first line of a paragraph. [...] doing that for an arbitrary point in the paragraph would be even harder.

[...]

The basic point is that that the entire paragraph is set essentially as a single line, by the time the paragraph breaker is invoked to break the paragraph into lines, all macros (and assignments) have been done. The linebreaker just deals with boxes.

Note luatex provides callbacks that probably invalidate the above answer

Regards

[Laurentius]

Thanks. What I wanted was an easy way to skip to the next line but continue from the same horizontal position. I know that this is easy to do; I just wondered if there were a (very) simple way to do it, but I suppose there is not.

[cgnieder]

There might be ways to achieve what you want but it will be much easier to recommend anything if you'd tell us the real use case, i.e. what you are actually trying to typeset.

Regards