From 7a6871397b80a624067ced8381fced65d4f6f246 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Trevor Daniels Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2016 23:08:18 +0100 Subject: Doc: Issue 4958: CG: Expand description of the engraver hooks The previous rather terse description did not make it clear that grobs may not be created in the stop-translation-timestep hook. Thanks to David K for the text. --- Documentation/contributor/programming-work.itexi | 28 +++++++++++++++++++----- 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/contributor/programming-work.itexi b/Documentation/contributor/programming-work.itexi index 8dc8d2755b..d13b68099c 100644 --- a/Documentation/contributor/programming-work.itexi +++ b/Documentation/contributor/programming-work.itexi @@ -1758,11 +1758,29 @@ Acknowledge functions are called in the order engravers are @code{\consist}-ed (the only exception is if you set @code{must-be-last} to @code{#t}). -If useful things are to be done to the acknowledged grobs, this -should be deferred until all the acknowledging has finished, i.e., -store the acknowledged grobs and process the information in a -@code{process-acknowledged ()} or @code{stop-translation-timestep ()} -function. +There will always be a call to @code{process-acknowledged ()} whenever +grobs have been created, and @emph{reading} stuff from grobs should be +delayed until then since other acknowledgers might @emph{write} stuff +into a grob even after your acknowledger has been called. So the basic +workflow is to use the various acknowledgers to @emph{record} the grobs +you are interested in and @emph{write} stuff into them (or do read/write +stuff that more or less is accumulative and/or really unrelated to other +engravers), and then use the @code{process-acknowledged ()} hook for +processing (including @emph{reading}) the grobs you had recorded. + +You can create new grobs in @code{process-acknowledged ()}. That will lead +to a new cycle of @code{acknowledger ()} calls followed by a new cycle of +@code{process-acknowledged ()} calls. + +Only when all those cycles are over is @code{stop-translator-timestep ()} +called, and then creating grobs is no longer an option. You can still +@q{process} parts of the grob there (if that means just reading out +properties and possibly setting context properties based on them) but +@code{stop-translation-timestep ()} is a cleanup hook, and other engravers +might have already cleaned up stuff you might have wanted to use. +Creating grobs in there is not possible since engravers and other code may +no longer be in a state where they could process them, possibly causing +a crash. @node Engraver declaration/documentation -- cgit v1.2.3