ms361@leah.Albany.Edu (Mark Steinberger) (01/11/90)
In article <3719@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>, dhosek@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (dhosek) writes: > Well, part of the problem is that \newcommand is quite limited in what > it can do. To do any fancy macro stuff, I fear, you have to descend to > the level of (gasp) plain TeX. The process of using plain tex commands in latex seems, unfortunately, to be the aspect of latex that is least well documented. Having learned plain first, I used to try using plain usages in my latex, and often received error messages which I found very difficult to debug. Has anyone done a serious study of which tex commands may be used in latex? Would it be possible to share this with the general community? Thanks. --Mark
dhosek@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (dhosek) (01/11/90)
In article <2380@leah.Albany.Edu> ms361@leah.Albany.Edu (Mark Steinberger) writes: >In article <3719@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>, dhosek@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (dhosek) writes: >> Well, part of the problem is that \newcommand is quite limited in what >> it can do. To do any fancy macro stuff, I fear, you have to descend to >> the level of (gasp) plain TeX. >The process of using plain tex commands in latex seems, unfortunately, >to be the aspect of latex that is least well documented. Having learned >plain first, I used to try using plain usages in my latex, and often >received error messages which I found very difficult to debug. >Has anyone done a serious study of which tex commands may be used in latex? >Would it be possible to share this with the general community? The LaTeX manual has a brief appendix on this topic. In general, you should use LaTeX constructions wherever possible. Things that will give the most problems are constructions (e.g., \hrule, \hbox, \halign, etc.) that act differently in different modes and/or cause one to change modes (i.e., go from horizontal mode (L-R mode in LaTeXspeak) to vertical mode) -dh -- "Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior" -Catullus D.A. Hosek. UUCP: uunet!jarthur!dhosek Internet: dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu