> First there needs to be perhaps a bit more discussion as to what is > actually needed and then some about the plan of attack. It is good to see latex-l coming alive again:-) Basically I think you will find that everyone agrees that a standardised set of markup for journal articles would be a good thing and that the `standard' article class hinders rather than helps by having a non existent set of commands for frontmatter markup. As explained in the last ltnews, it does not really make sense to try to extend those classes now as that just creates more problems than it solves. One possible approach would be: a) a package was developed implementing a frontmatter markup rich enough for multi-author journal submissions, together with hooks to allow journal class files to typeset the frontmatter in different ways from the same initial markup. b) Journal `production' class files accepted this `standardised' markup, either by using the above package, or at least implementing a consistent (for the author) set of commands. (I notice that Patrick commented earlier in this thread that sometimes it is better to embed a `mini-natbib' directly into a class file rather than \RequirePackage{natbib}.) As Sebastian mentioned, I have a trial implementation of such a frontmatter package athough I have been resisting making it public in its present form as I am not happy with the author-syntax that it currently implements, and the implementation itself will probably have to change completely. (It is an entertaining exercise to come up with an implementation that will allow the same author markup to be typeset in the house styles of AMS, Kluwer and Elsevier (one could add more, but those three are already quite a problem:-) Ideally one would like the author only to have to change \documentclass{journal-one} to \documentclass{journal-two} if journal-one has the bad taste to reject his article, but house styles vary considerably (eg authors grouped by affiliation or not) which means that the `natural' author markup for one journal might not look so natural when applied to another. (My current implementation is essentially no good at all for the Kluwer styles, which is one reason I am not keen on letting it out.) I may add some comments describing the current very experimental status of the package and then make it available to people on this list if there is interest in this. Phillip, I see I sent you a copy of that in the summer, does it seem to go in the right direction? David PS If you give me a guided tour of Jodrell Bank (which is only a few minutes down the road from Hazel Grove) we could discuss this over coffee:-)