X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t nil] [nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil]) Date: Wed, 4 Jul 90 16:53:33 CET Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list From: N.POPPELIER@ELSEVIER.NL To: Rainer Schoepf Subj: reply to 15-page article Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 158 Recently someone contributed a 15-page article to this list. I forgot the name -- I'm sorry for this: I only have a print-out of the article and not the corresponding mail message -- but it has the following sections, so maybe some of you can identify it: 1 General 1.1 Assumptions about structure 1.2 Use of counts ... 2 Preliminary pages ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I agree with most of what is written in this, but I would like to add a few comments. - In section 1.1 the author writes 'One-to-one mappings between standard LaTeX styles and standard SGML DTDs would be nice!' Although there are a few (proposed) standard dtd's, the only thing about SGML that is really standard is the meta-language itself. SGML should, in my opinion, stand for Standard Generalized Meta Language, because that's what it is. Anyway, the existing dtd's for articles and books that I have worked with, by ISO and the AAP (Association of American Publishers), are not detailed enough. But this is just an aside. What this group could do is describe a few classes of documents in terms of SGML or something SGML-ish, and then create example document styles for each of these classes. - Front matter: if you look at the ISO and AAP dtd's for scientific articles, you immediately notice that an important part of the dtd is devoted to the front matter; in a book one would call this the preliminary pages. Now what is striking in the existing standard document styles is the lack of structure for the front matter elements. For example, there is even no provision for separate specification of author and address! Page numbering and page-number representation are important as well, but not as important as the apparent lack of structuring of the front matter. - Fixed tables and figures: I think these are things that should not be included. In conventional article and book typesetting, figures and tables are always floating elements. The confusion described in section 3 is a matter of the user and his/her obvious lack of training: if you want to drive a car, you get your license -- if you want to use LaTeX, you read the manual! - Captions: for every journal or book, at least in our company, there are strict rules for the placement of captions. One of the reasons for the vagueness in LaTeX 2.09 concerning captions seems to be the possibility to use combinations of minipage and caption to get, e.g., figure and caption side-by-side, or two figures side-by-side with captions underneath. - Footnotes, source notes, etc. in tables. See section 4.3 of the paper I'm referring to. You also need a mechanism to have a note mark, say $^{a)}$, appear more than once in a table, with the explanatory text at the bottom. You can't do this with footnotes. (Maybe this belongs on the list for LaTeX 3.0) - Footnotes and endnotes: there is no provision in LaTeX for endnotes in the text. In the arts and humanities you see these a lot. - Rules in tables: two successive \hline's in a tabular environment produce two horizontal lines with a little vertical space. If the table contains no vertical rules, that's what you want. But if the table *does* contain vertical rules, we want the vertical rules, in principle, to extend over the entire height of the table. In other words: there should not be vertical space between the \hline's, but a line with small \vrule's and empty table cells. - LaTeX and BibTeX have to provide .sty and .bst for the name-year system of literature references. Now I don't care what the 'Chicago Manual of Style' says -- could someone find out what the CMoS says? I *am* curious* -- but our handbook of style says that the name-year system and the number system are both allowed. Nico Poppelier Elsevier Science Publishers Physical Sciences and Engineering Division, R&D Department Sara Burgerhartstraat 25, 1055 KV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Telephone: +(20)5862504. Telefax: +(20)5862425 Email: n.poppelier@elsevier.nl