In-reply-to: <9507141428.AA07374@r8h.cs.man.ac.uk> (message from David Carlisle
 on Fri, 14 Jul 1995 15:28:32 BST)
Reply-to: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@VM.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
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Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 15:44:00 -0300 (BST)
From: Alan Jeffrey <alanje@COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@VM.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@VM.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject: Re: 4 small packages of basic 2e code made available
Status: R

>> Do you
>> think that a LaTeX source document which has the line
>> "\documentclass{article}" should ideally compile to an identical dvi
>> file on every LaTeX site?  I don't think so, I think a site should
>> be free to make changes without having to write, say, "xarticle".

Backing David up on this one...  As the LaTeX maintainer here, I know
that authors swap LaTeX documents between sites, and they get awfully
confused and annoyed if documents format differently on different
sites.  Authors (at least the authors here at COGS) really do rely on
LaTeX documents formatting identically on different sites---for
example squeezing a paper into exactly 12pp, or tweaking the text to
get the right pagebreaks.  Ocassionally there are differences in
typesetting between different LaTeX sites (e.g. different float
placement, or packages which use LaTeX internals which have changed)
and then I usually get a vociferous complaint.

For LaTeX3 it would be nice to separate logical markup from
typesetting rules, but even then I would expect the same document with
the same typesetting rules to format identically on every site (within
the bounds of possibility offered by TeX and the need to perform bug
fixes to LaTeX).

Alan.