Sebastian Rahtz writes: > b) please lets have portable programs written in the genuinely > popular langauges, viz TeX or C++ Ha ha, I think Sebastian omitted a couple of smilies. Let's keep it `in the family', viz. a TeX-only solution. We have all worked very hard to make sure that TeX works `the same' across platforms. I strongly agree that adding a Unixy tool is a backward step. Perl is not Unix-specific, it's `way cool', but not everybody has it. (`TeX Live'-style solutions - precompiled binaries - may be the answer to this objection.) In my opninion, what we need are smarter tools or smarter support for combining multiple documents into one. Specials aside, dviconcat works well at the level of combining dvi files. But combining TeX or LaTeX source files is still not so easy. Publishers will come up with their own solutions. (Perhaps Sebastian can inform us about Elsevier practice.) Let's work towards some sort of standard or protocol for combining documents. Richard.