> 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.

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

Ask Michel Goossens or I about our experiences with someone writing
VMS documentation who changed the catcode of $ so that he could write
FOO$BAR without any special worries. Try throwing the result at eg
latex2html

sebastian