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Date:         Fri, 2 Mar 90 00:41:00 PST
Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1@unido.bitnet>
Sender: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1@unido.bitnet>
From: DHOSEK@HMCVAX.bitnet
Subject:      Priorities et alia
To: Rainer Schoepf <BK4@DHDURZ1.uucp>
Status: R
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X-UID: 47

A couple of things that I figure are worth pointing out:

(1) There will be a course in LaTeX style files at the Texas A&M
    TUG meeting which I will be teaching. As such it would be
    nice to at least have the improvements to the style interface
    defined if not coded by then. I believe that Rainer has taken
    my quarter bet on this and offered Champagne on top if we can
    have it by then.
(2) There is no reason not to retain backwards compatibility in
    the style interface. Yes, there are a lot of rotten styles
    out there, but changing the way \@startsection is defined
    in an incompatible manner is not going to change that. Frank
    has the right idea in choosing a different name for his
    \@startsection "replacement"; the changes to today's document
    styles in order to get compatibility with the new interface
    should be minimal. (I hope all of you who were at last year's
    TUG meeting winced just as much as I did at the description
    of how the letter and memo styles were done).
(3) The new interface, for testing purposes can be distributed as
    a LaTeX add-on (say newstyles.ext) which would be input at
    the beginning of a style file using its extensions if they
    are not already present. Something along the lines of
     \ifx\undefined\@newstartsection \input newstyles.ext\fi
    would be adequate.

-dh