dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.) (07/19/90)
In article <2857307721@ARTEMIS.cam.nist.gov>, miller@cam.nist.gov (Bruce R. Miller) writes... >In article <7854@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>, Hosek, Donald A. writes: >> In article <1048100001@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>, phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu writes... >> > .... Is this (sending >> >macros with .tex) common in exchanging documents in TeX? >> Yep. LaTeX users (at least intelligent ones) can generally avoid >> this problem. >Educate me! This is a problem I've always run into with sending & >recieving (La)TeX files. With make or defsystem you have a clear >indication of what files are needed; so you know what needs to be sent. What I've been preaching for quite some time is that with LaTeX you want to avoid putting anything between \begin{document} and \end{document} that is format-specific. Thus, the platonic ideal of LaTeX would imply that I could take an article formatted for, say, the Journal of Stupid Formatting, and without changing anything after \begin{document} run it through my local system using \documentstyle{article}. Most of the document style options people use can either be omitted or should never have been there in the first place. As an example of an omittable option, consider, for example, drafthead (prints "Draft" in the page headers). Omitting this from the document style list won't do any harm. Options that probably shouldn't be called by the user are (among others) drop and doublespace. In the case of drop, this should be loaded by the documentstyle (if necessary) and *section headings* should call the \drop macro, *not* the user. (If people are really interested and nobody realizes how trivial this is before I acquiesce and give you the code and does it themself, I'll put together a style option that puts dropped capitals after every \section command). And yes, there are some cases where you absolutely must bring in external macros (e.g., if you need Sunil Podar's epic macros etc.) but these cases aren't as common as it would appear. -dh Incidentally, it is typically a good idea to at the beginning of each root TeX or LaTeX file to include a list of external files used and also additional fonts loaded. --- Don Hosek TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont Consulting and dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu production work. Free Estimates. dhosek@ymir.bitnet uunet!jarthur!ymir Phone: 714-625-0147