Message-Id: <9302022040.AA20605@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
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In-Reply-To:  Your message of Tue, 2 Feb 93 21:02:47 CET
Date:         Tue, 2 Feb 93 13:38:19 MST
From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@MATH.UTAH.EDU>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Re: document classes & numbering systems
Status: R


Michael Downes <MJD@MATH.AMS.ORG> comments on document classes and
numbering systems about consistency of cross-references being
invalidated when the numbering style changes after a switch to a
slightly different major document style.

I agree that the problem of consistency between \item~iii and
\item~\ref{it:3} is a serious one; consistency in general is very hard
to achieve, and the difficulty seems to be proportional to the length
of the document taken to some power greater than 1, perhaps as high as
3.

I don't know of any decent way to prevent it from happening either,
except by careful proofreading on the part of authors, editors, and
typists, and continual reinforcement of the lessons of structured
markup and avoidance of absolute cross references in electronic
documents.

There was discussion recently on TeXhax or TWG about publishers
forbidding authors from using any privately defined macros, ostensibly
to make it easier for publishers to read author-contributed
manuscripts.  In my view, this makes things even worse, because for
consistency I might use a macro like

	\newcommand{\eqref}[1]{Eq.~\ref{#1}}

A publisher that forbad such macros would likely get text that
contained a very inconsistent style of references like "Eq.~2",
"eq.~\ref{eq:2}", "eqn.~\ref{eq:2}", "Equation~\ref{eq:2}", and so on.

While a proofreader might catch such errors in a 5-page technical
paper, it is extremely difficult to do so in a 500-page technical
book.


========================================================================
Nelson H. F. Beebe                      Tel: +1 801 581 5254
Center for Scientific Computing         FAX: +1 801 581 4148
Department of Mathematics, 105 JWB      Internet: beebe@math.utah.edu
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
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