At 22:25 +0100 2001/08/31, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
>not for what the faq is talking about.  i thought it might provoke
>some lateral thought on your part, but plainly i was fantasising.
>
>you seemed to want something you could use now, so i thought i'ld
>offer something to help (since i'd been there myself).  sorry to
>disappoint...

I published the code I use, and it works for me. :-) As for the general
problem of compiling from multiple files, the stuff on the URL you gave
does give some lateral thought, but it also appears to be hacks trying to
cope with shortcomings in LaTeX:

A normal way for compilers is that if one compiles a file, then one gets an
object file associated with its filename, and nothing else. By contrast,
\include of LaTeX also writes .aux files for the included files, which thus
are not directly invoked by the compilation command. It means that if one
then compiles subfiles in separate compiles, these will wrote over the
object information of the main file. Thus, LaTeX would need to be changed
to only write one .aux file, for this scheme to work.

In addition, if one compiles a subfile, and that contains cross-references
to other files, then one would want a scheme to indicate that one wants to
read those .aux files as well.

>> Have you decided to keep the preamble style for LaTeX3, or is it not
>> possible to remove it?
>
>i haven't _decided_ anything about latex3.  many people have made many
>proposals that look pretty good to me.  but i have to admit i've yet
>to encounter a markup language which does away with any declaration of
>details of markup to be used ... it's sort of difficult.

It looks to me as though LaTeX3 will need some variation of Omega. Then one
might need to have a look if TeX should be tweaked so that one can do away
with the preamble style somehow, that is, instead of having global
declarations, making them local to a TeX environment.

  Hans Aberg