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Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]>
Tue, 2 Nov 1999 21:39:40 +0100
text/plain (62 lines)
Thierry Bouche writes:
 > Frank Mittelbach a écrit:
 > >  o should there be user level control on whether or not a heading has
 > >    a number?
 >
 > What happens to text like "see section \ref{sec:xx}" if the class
 > designer withdrawed numbers, the author being not aware of that?

that is a question for which there isn't really a good answer.

in current LaTeX, the ref refers to the last unit that sets \@currentlabel
which means that if in the hierarchy of headings there is a heading which
still is number you will get that number. that may not be perfect (eg if that
is the chapter but the text says "see section 1" then, but it is better than
nothing).

some people would like to see the possibility of getting the heading text as a
reference (like the IBM manuals do) and come up with "see section ``How to
Configure XYZ'', other people say that you can never get this right and
definitely can't automatically change from one style to another.

it is most certainly the case that any design change of the type "different
levels for heading numbers" or "references using heading text" can not really
be made without checking and potentially correcting a document afterwards.  in
other words i think that to some extend the author of a document has to be
aware of the layout he/she is targetting for in this respect. (a similar
example and perhaps worse is citation styles, eg author/date viz
sequence-numbers: you can't typeset a document in both styles using the same
source)

=================================

i would call two latex classes (the term class is actually bad in 2e) "source
compatible" if they can successfully process the same documents, ie provide
the same user commands and functionality. in other words a document that can
be processed by article.cls would be processable (with sensible results) by
any other class that is source compatible to article.cls --- one could say the
two LaTeX2e classes belong to the same class, urg (this is when i meant the
term was badly chosen).

now i wonder if i would claim that article.cls and myarticle.cls differing
only in the setting of the secnumdepth counter should be considered
incompatible in the above sense.

there are arguments for it and arguments against it:

 - since the availibility of numbering or generally the availability of
   refering to  a heading via \ref differs one can argue the classes are not
   source compatible

 - on the other hand this is making the granularity very small and it might
   mean that coming up with sufficient additional issues of that type nearly
   no class can be considered compatible to another one.

 - ...


frank

ps seems that the post i replied to, took a long time (three days?) to get
past the listserv, or was this only to me?

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