> > For *one* paper, the way described by P.H. above works well. I suppose > > that the main problem is that in most journals there are several > > papers, so, if each of them has no clashes with latex2e and the > > journal styles, there is also the problem of clashes *between* the > > papers. > > > to be honest, it never occured to me to think about macro name > clashes; that seems to be the least of the problems. i guess most of > us work an article at a time anyway. I had been thinking about individual papers as well, and I don't know to what extent this is a problem. In any case, the variants on \providecommand discussed a while back (in this case if undefined, define, if defined, override) could solve this problem easily. > the problem is that few typesetters use LaTeX; so the markup has to be > converted to some other system (in our case, via SGML). converting > LaTeX is hard, and hard-pressed workers adopt simplistic > search-and-replace methods. obviously these fail if there are cutesy > author-defined macros which affect the whole paper It seems to me that it is much better for a few people to work hard at LaTeX to HTML conversion, or whatever is required, rather than making each author of each paper do a lot of unnecessary work. -- Phillip Helbig Email .......... [log in to unmask] Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. ..... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................. +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................. 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web .... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester.