Chapter 7 Alignments

There are several situations where  stacks or aligns a number of objects into a one or two dimensional grids. In most cases, these are built upon low-level primitives, like \halign, and so share characteristics: using & to separate alignment columns; either \\ or \cr to separate rows. Yet, there are many different markup patterns and environments used for quite different purposes from tabular text to math arrays to composing symbols and so it is worth recognizing the intended semantics in each case, while still processing them as  would.

In this chapter, we will describe some of the special complications presented by alignments and the strategies used to infer and represent the appropriate semantic structures, particularly for math.