Message-Id: <199407041345.PAA28103@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1.BITNET>
In-Reply-To:  <9407020834.AA13581@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> (message from Richard Walker
              on Sat, 2 Jul 1994 18:29:05 +1000)
Date:         Mon, 4 Jul 1994 10:45:33 BST
From: David Carlisle <carlisle@cs.man.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: The future of slides
Status: R

> But I wonder if we could move towards incorporating some more
> of the good features of FoilTeX and seminar.  I think
> we have learned a number of lessons from these packages
> (cf. the colour support I mentioned, which came about
> because of the co\"operation of FoilTeX's authors and
> Tom Rokicki) that could be fed back into the slides class.

Yes well slides class is a bit basic. but, both seminar and foiltex
are being upgraded to 2e by their respective authors.

Having such choices is of course a Good Thing. One of the sad things
about current LaTeX usage is that most people (probably not most people
on this list) associate LaTeX with article class documents (and slide
class slides) and then complain that all LaTeX documents look alike.

In The Companion, and in the free documentation coming with 2e we have
tried to encourage the creation and use of alternative classes and
packages, so as to exploit LaTeX's under-used ability to produce
different designs from essentially the same (or at least similar)
logical markup.

So while I would agree that a LaTeX3 slide class could probably learn
something from the features offered by foiltex & seminar, I think that
The idea of having one all-purpose, official, slides (or article)
class is essentially doomed. The standard classes should be powerful
enough to be useable, but still small enough to be a `basis' on which
people can build alternative classes.

So having more powerful `non standard' alternative classes alongside
a `standard' class should be seen as the norm rather than the
exception.

David

(The above is not necessarily a `LaTeX3 project view' but a personal
response to the quoted comment)