toms@NCIFCRF.GOV (01/07/89)
The following is a letter I just sent to Leslie Lamport. I thought it might
be helpful to have discussion on it in this group.
Dear Leslie:
I understand you are or are considering a second version of LaTeX. Bravo!
There is one thing that remains totally obscure to me from the current
manual and this is the business about robustness, fragility and
moving arguments. I've read the definitions and they seem all circular
and refer to each other. I don't know what causes the problem, how
to recognize it if it comes up. Maybe it has and I never recognized it.
To make sure, I just scanned over all the references in the Index
on fragile command, pages 24,27,34,151 and 119. All the terms are defined
in terms of the other terms! THIS IS FRUSTRATING!!!
A few paragraphs that REALLY say what's going on would be of great help!
Also, it turns out that I write a LOT of letters which have references in
them. So do other scientists. Since the letter environment does not support
this, I have made up my own format. Please make it possible to have
references in letters in the next version!
Finally, controls for the form of a reference in the text would
be quite useful, to avoid this proliferation of styles. (I now know how
to program the format of the references, and I'm happy with that solution.)
A simple switch would be useful: bracked, parenthesis, superscript for
the reference. Also, getting rid of the word REFERENCES is a pain;
this should be a switch. Finally, something within LaTeX must decide
to put spaces between the references, I couldn't locate it (since I
don't know TeX code) and to make my Nucleic Acids Research reference list
work out properly I had to neutralize the blank lines with:
\vspace{-\baselineskip}\vspace{4pt}
in the bbl file. That doesn't seem to be quite right, but it works
pretty well. Sure is an ugly solution. The point is that the
bbl should have COMPLETE control over the format of the references!!
Sincerely yours,
Tom Schnesder
National Cancer Institute
Laboratory of Mathematical Biology
Frederick, Maryland
toms@ncifcrf.govtoms@NCIFCRF.GOV (01/13/89)
OOPS!! Sorry that message was to go to a different news group; I typed the wrong mail alias. Thanks to those who pointed out the error. Tom