nelson beebe has asked about a problem that arose when he tried this with amsmath: \newenvironment{fancyequation} {\hrule \begin{equation}} {\end{equation}\hrule} sorry, nelson -- that's a feature, not a bug. here's what it says in the file technote.tex that's distributed with the ams-latex collection. \section{Why can't I use abbreviations for the \env{equation} environment?} Many users have discovered to their dismay that when switching from ordinary \latex/ to the \pkg{amsmath} package, they are no longer able to use abbreviations such as |\beq| |\eeq| for |\begin{equation}| |\end{equation}|. This has to do with unfortunately nontrivial technical complications: the environments such as \env{align} must read their contents as a delimited macro argument because they do multipass processing of the contents using algorithms inherited from Spivak's \fn{amstex.tex}. The obvious solution---substitution of different algorithms that do box shuffling instead of token shuffling for the multipass calculations---would require rewriting these display environments from the ground up; while that is a worthy goal, it was beyond the original scope of the \amslatex/ project. Some progress has in fact been made on such a solution [time of writing: January 1995], but not yet to the point of being ready for release. Users have proposed two workarounds (September 1996): \begin{itemize} \item |\def\beq#1\eeq{\begin{equation}#1\end{equation}}| (Donald Arseneau) \item Define |\newcommand{\env}[2]{\begin{#1}#2\end{#1}}| and then use |\env{equation}{...}| (Michael Skeide) \end{itemize} -------------------- this may change in the future, but i'm not going to hold *my* breath. -- bb