Message-Id: <9302241422.AA09477@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Date:         Wed, 24 Feb 93 15:22:49 CET
From: Michael Downes <MJD@MATH.AMS.ORG>
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:      subdocuments
Status: R


There was some discussion at the 1992 TUG meeting in Portland Oregon,
at the LaTeX3 BOF, about subdocuments inside documents. Would
interested persons (Nelson, are you reading this?) please provide
descriptions of real-world examples, so that the problem can be
understood more clearly? The general types of examples that I know
about are:

---A conference proceedings consisting of a collection of `article'
class documents. The proceedings documentstyle may enforce some
style settings that differ from settings that were used by the
article-class documentstyles of individual documents.

One approach for doing a proceedings volume is to send the proceedings
documentstyle to all the authors and require them to change from their
previous article-class documentstyle to the new documentstyle, and
clear up all discrepancies introduced by this change, before
submitting their electronic document for the volume. But if it is
possible, I think a proceedings editor would rather be able to put
together a collection of documents with various article-class
documentstyles (article, xxxart, yyyart, ...) and run them with a
driver file that automatically handles the \documentstyle,
\begin{document}, \maketitle, \end{document} inside each article. This
way (ideally) the editor would not have to modify the individual
articles at all.  However, there are some difficult problems with
processing together a collection of articles by different authors.

---In documentation, it is sometimes useful to be able to print an
example containing a small piece of a document. The example might
contain arbitrary commands, but we do not want those commands to have
side effects in the parent document, e.g. a \chapter command inside
the example should not execute a \cleardoublepage or change the
running heads, and a \setcounter command should not affect the value
of that counter outside the example.

---In putting together a collection of files one might want to write
each file as if it were a self-contained article, so that it can be
processed individually by LaTeX for some purposes, but then have the
sectioning levels shift down \maketitle-->\section,
\section-->\subsection, \subsection-->\subsubsection, and so on, when
the files are combined in a larger article.

More specific instances of each of these examples, with notes about
difficulties that arose, would be useful.

Michael Downes                              mjd@math.ams.org (Internet)