> > It might make sense to include these classes as an official part of > > latex, so the commercial distributions will include them as well. > > the problem with that is that it would directly bounce back to the > latex team in form of support questions so i think it can not be part > of core. but if we have such a collection it wouldn't be too difficult > to integrate it nevertheless into all major distributions. the commercial/major distributions do not include all the contrib packages on CTAN anyway. only TeX Live has them all (more or less) and that is far too big for most people. So if Mark puts nyj.cls on CTAN, the chance of it appearing in eg what Y&Y or Textures distribute is vanishingly small. ideally one would like a classification (such as TeX Live uses) to say that a given package is one of `vital', `really useful', `sometimes useful', `only for specialists'. All we have now is the `vital', eg the packages in macros/latex/tools which They agree must be supported. But how to agree on the rest? I have 0% interest in ever using nyj.cls myself but for someone else it will be theeir daily tool. > is there anybody willing to work on such a collection? it would sure > help the LaTeX community a lot. to some extent I have done it, in that I _have_ classified all the LaTeX contrib packages on CTAN into 1, 2 or 3. if the LaTeX team endorsed it, we could put pressure on all distributions to include the class 1 and 2 stuff. clearly class 1 is the material that They guarentee, class 2 would be the stuff that they dont support, but which We consider widely useful. i see that i include in this category: arseneau cite german ntgclass seminar booktabs cslatex hyperref patch wasysym calc fancyheadings jknappen pslatex caption fancyvrb ltxmisc pspicture carlisle float mathcomp revtex changebar footnote misc209 rotating which as you can see is highly subjective.... Sebastian