Message-Id: <199401281610.AA16064@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Fri, 28 Jan 1994 15:59:10 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:      Re: form and content
Status: R

%>From:          bbeeton <BNB@MATH.AMS.ORG>

%>
%>in this discussion of whether any of the built-in latex content-tagging
%>commands should or should not be used, in favor of only tags defined
%>in the preamble of a given paper, i submit that this ignores the
%>attempts of some of us to present a solid, logical user interface
%>that essentially omits the ad hoc use of {\bf ...} et al.  while i
%>think it's a good idea to suggest that a user create new definitions
%>for, e.g. \Emphasis{\em ...}, \Booktitle{\it ...}, and the like (if
%>they're not already available), depending on what actually appears
%>in the document, i think that many really common entities should be
%>able to be provided and the strong suggestion that the given tagging
%>scheme be used.
%>
%>that's not to say that
%>   \begin{section}[sectiontitle]["short" section title]
%>   ...
%>   \end{section}
%>or something of that sort doesn't make more sense -- it does.
%>but please don't throw away the possibility of using a predefined
%>scheme in a real production environment.  to suggest that each
%>user should "roll his own" would make that very difficult and
%>costly.
%>                                                -- bb
%>

Right, I agree that in some circumstances, eg, AMS submissions, the style
should most definitely be normative; the user *must* use the given macros.
Indeed, I believe that some journals go as far as to forbid the definition of
macros in papers.

But I was thinking of the context in which the format is not rigidly fixed,
and indeed is fluid. Suppose I am undecided about whether to send a paper to
journal X or Y, where X and Y have different macros. Surely it makes sense to
write in terms of my own macros, and then map those either to X or to Y in
the preamble, rather than have to do a lengthy edit to convert between
formats. Even worse, journal X might have a format

\def\Thm#1.#2\par{...}

while Y has the format

\begin{th}....\end{th}

X produces

{\sc Theorem #1.}{\em #2}

and Y produces

{\bf Theorem nn} text

where nn is an automatic numbering.

Mike Piff

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