X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] ["1750" "Fri" "5" "December" "1997" "13:43:27" "GMT" "Phillip Helbig" "helbig@MULTIVAC.JB.MAN.AC.UK" nil "35" "Re: private macros and journal .cls" "^Date:" nil nil "12" nil nil nil nil nil] nil) Received: from listserv.gmd.de (listserv.gmd.de [192.88.97.1]) by mail.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA22072; Fri, 5 Dec 1997 14:43:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from lsv1.listserv.gmd.de by listserv.gmd.de (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <10.AD276D7A@listserv.gmd.de>; Fri, 5 Dec 1997 14:43:55 +0100 Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 246809 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 5 Dec 1997 14:43:46 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA12781 for ; Fri, 5 Dec 1997 14:43:43 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <97120513432713@multivac.jb.man.ac.uk> Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Date: Fri, 5 Dec 1997 13:43:27 GMT From: Phillip Helbig Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Subject: Re: private macros and journal .cls Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 2533 > > For *one* paper, the way described by P.H. above works well. I suppose > > that the main problem is that in most journals there are several > > papers, so, if each of them has no clashes with latex2e and the > > journal styles, there is also the problem of clashes *between* the > > papers. > > > to be honest, it never occured to me to think about macro name > clashes; that seems to be the least of the problems. i guess most of > us work an article at a time anyway. I had been thinking about individual papers as well, and I don't know to what extent this is a problem. In any case, the variants on \providecommand discussed a while back (in this case if undefined, define, if defined, override) could solve this problem easily. > the problem is that few typesetters use LaTeX; so the markup has to be > converted to some other system (in our case, via SGML). converting > LaTeX is hard, and hard-pressed workers adopt simplistic > search-and-replace methods. obviously these fail if there are cutesy > author-defined macros which affect the whole paper It seems to me that it is much better for a few people to work hard at LaTeX to HTML conversion, or whatever is required, rather than making each author of each paper do a lot of unnecessary work. -- Phillip Helbig Email .......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. ..... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................. +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................. 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web .... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester.