Mark Steinberger wrote: > > There may well be many more class files out there than are currently > available on CTAN. > > For instance, nyj.cls, the class for the New York Journal of > Mathematics, has never been posted to CTAN (but will be, shortly). Indeed, for example the AMS has some author packages which are not part of the standard AMSLaTeX distribution. In particular, the pcms-l class is very nice and is designed for multiple authors volumes which are not directly supported by any of the standard classes. Cambridge University Press has a JFM class which has been ported to LaTeX2e, and as I remember there is even something on the German Springer web site... If you look at these classes, they point to some problem which will grow in the future: The standard LaTeX classes have a rather restricted set of front matter commands. So every publisher is extending them in mutually incompatible ways. The AMS classes have reversed the order of abstract and \maketitle with good reason, I believe, and there is a case that this should be the default behaviour for all classes. My experience is that the AMS frontmatter handling is rather advanced and can easily be adopted to yield distinctly non-AMS design and ordering of front matter material. So I would put this forward as a standard that every class should strive to comply with. Or has anyone noticed some intrinsic problems or deficiencies which will need to be addressed to make the cheme useful in more general circumstances? In any case, there is definitely the need for a standard. I would like to be able to just change the document class to reformat my documents in a different style without having to do trivial but annoying changes to the front matter. Also, when I start writing an article, I don't necessarily know where it will be published. Thus it is practically useful to have a front matter standard that all publishers could agree to and comply with. Marcel