Message-Id: <199401281108.AA07225@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Fri, 28 Jan 1994 11:02:16 LCL
From: Mike Piff <M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      form and content
Status: R

Some thoughts on what should go between \begin{document} and \end{document}.

This is a problem that has troubled me greatly over the years I have used
LaTeX.  I am coming more and more to the conclusion that *only* commands that
the user defines in the preamble should be used between \begin{document} and
\end{document}. Thus even innocent commands like \em, \section, \rightarrow,
etc, should not be used. The problem arises when the user wishes to re-format
a document and change some of the \em's but not all to \bf's, or to change
some \rightarrow's to =, or whatever. If the user has written \Emphasize{..}
or \Define{...} then the change is trivial. Otherwise, the whole document has
to be edited just to change its appearance slightly.

I am thinking here of longish documents that undergo frequent modification,
not 2 page letters.  But there are problematic areas, for instance, to ban
the use of & and \\ in tabular environments is sometimes desirable, but
incredibly tedious. (One might want to print a list two times, once with all
columns visible and once with only some of them visible, eg, paper marks
and final exam marks, or retail price and trade price.)

What do others on the list see as good practice? Probably most of us run a
happy medium between the above and the

{\bf Section 2}\\
\\
A {\em matrix\/} is defined by
\[ a_{i,j}=1,~~~{\rm for\ all}i,j\in\{1,\ldots,n\}.\]

which our (WYSI(Almost)WYG trained) secretaries (and some staff) produce.  But
take the above example. Clearly, we should use \Set{1,\ldots,n}, and \quad
rather than ~~~. But what about \[ and \], _, and \mbox{....\Set{...}}?
Should we ban these too?  I am sure that many of you have had to edit $xyz$.
into \[xyz.\] plenty of times, just the sort of thing you need to do on
changing \textwidth for instance.  It is difficult to conceive of how each
formula that might need to be moved from in-line to display could be
individually marked, although a tag such as \Math{} or \Math[D]{} might be
used to make the editing easier. And I guess the period could be moved inside
the maths. But what if it is a semicolon?


Mike

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% Dr M J Piff, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of %%
%% Sheffield, UK.                    e-mail: M.Piff@sheffield.ac.uk %%
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