> You can more or less get (1) by just having the master class redefine > \documentclass to do nothing, re-enable \usepackage for use by the > articles, and just set up whatever typographic details are needed to > handle the `front matter' of the individual articles when considered > as sections in the larger work. If you put each article in a group the save stack can take a serious hit. This used to cause trouble for us on occasion when doing the book reviews section in one of our journals. Partial blame, however, was eventually laid to some unnecessary carelessness with the save stack in certain macros. And as the capacity of TeX systems continues to grow, the save stack may practically speaking cease to be a concern. > There are problems when you start to consider packages used by the > different articles clashing, and issues relating to avoiding namespace > clashes with \label etc, but they are not insurmountable (probably:-). Nevertheless imho they are troublesome enough that a better approach would be to set up a system of communicating between the different parts through an auxiliary file. At the end of the first part, measure the actual depth of the last page and pass it to the next article, along with the current page number and whatever else is needed. This means using an OS-specific script to process the whole collection instead of a single LaTeX run, but you avoid so many other problems that it's worth it. Ad hoc customization for individual parts done by different authors, such as \mathcode`\"=8000 \begingroup \catcode`\"=\active \gdef"{^{\prime\prime}} \endgroup will make trouble even if each article is enclosed in its own group and there are many ways for this kind of trouble to come up. > 2) A generalised \include/\includeonly system that does not force the > \clearpage as in the current implementation. > (2) is harder and perhaps not even possible in full generality, > depending on what you want to specify happens to floats, whether or > not they are allowed to float out of or into regions of the document > that are potentially not included. Understood; but isn't it true that the floats will get printed in any case (in the next really included portion, or at \end{document})? The worst scenario that I can see is some floats from section 3 get printed in section 5 if the user didn't happen to include section 4 on this particular LaTeX run. Will this happen often enough in practice to really be a problem? And if \include didn't include a \clearpage it would be easy enough to add one in front of the \include statements that needed it, whereas taking it out isn't so easy. I suppose this idea has been suggested before?: At an \include boundary, take all the floats in \@toplist, \@botlist, \@deferlist and set them at the end of the preceding text as `here!' floats, with enough stretch in the inter-float space to get through any page-breaking problems. Isn't the main unsolved problem for \include making sure that non-immediate \write's go to the proper .aux file? Michael Downes