@Cite can seriously affect justification

[J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)]

[The following was reported through the Debian bugtracking system
(http://bugs.debian.org). Please preserve the Cc: 179...@bugs.debian.org on
on-topic responses]

Package: lout
Version: 3.25-1
Severity: normal

When setting

@RefCiteLabels { @Label }

in the include file, so that citations can be long, and when they have
longish lables like

@Label { ``Line composition rules'', 1995 }

then what happens is that, when the citations are included in the text with
@Cite{$..}, they are typeset together with the preceding word as unbreakable
horizontal boxes. This makes for some quite large units that can seriously
disrupt justification - for example, if one occurs near the end of the first
(printed) line of a paragraph, that first line can appear stretched out
Word-style, or (even worse) the citation can disappear off the right-hand
edge of the page! (Sorry I didn't save the source that did that.)

Perhaps you can pass this upstream, but I think it would be nice to at least
have an option for citations to be treated as normal breakable text, or at
least something slightly more clever than the current arrangement.

-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux ssb22 2.4.18 #10 Wed Jul 3 00:22:04 BST 2002 i686
Locale: LANG=en_GB, LC_CTYPE=en_GB

Versions of packages lout depends on:
ii libc6 2.2.5-11.2 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii zlib1g 1:1.1.4-1 compression library - runtime

[Jeff Kingston]

Thanks for the report. I've reproduced the problem here, and I agree
it's a problem, so I'll see what I can do about it for the next
release. It's funny, a quick look through the source files shows
no reason why the text should be being held together like that.
I'll have to do some detailed tracing, I think, to find out what
is causing it.

Jeff Kingston

[Reimer Behrends]

The whole label is inside a @LinkSource, which prevents paragraph
breaking, I think.

Reimer Behrends