Marcel Oliver writes: > What I would really like to see at the user level is the possibility > of relative sectioning commands. having read this far i thought that you meant something like this: \begin{head}{Main heading} text text text \begin{head}{Sub heading} text text \end{head} \begin{head}{Another sub heading} text text \end{head} \end{head} etc. something like this would be easy to provide, eg you simply would do something like this: \newcounter{headlevel} \DeclareDocumentEnvironment{head} { s o m } % or whatever you parse here { \stepcounter{headlevel} \UseInstance{heading}{\Alph{headlevel}-head} ... } { \addtocounter{headlevel}{-1} } which means that for each level one would need to define an instance with the name A-head, B-head, ... however, this would not solve: > One requirement should be that one > can mix absolute and relative sectioning in a natural way. To explain but to be honnest i don't think that a concept of mixing absolute names with relative names via a label/ref mechanism is really helpful. > \section{AAA} \label{aaa} > \section[aaa]{BBB} > \subsection{CCC} > \section{DDD} I agree that it is a bit of a pain to change a heading tree in a LaTeX document at the moment but something like the above seems to mak a document completely uncomprehensible (if used on a larger scale). So in my opinion it is better to either accept that changing the names is necessary if one changes the structure or to use a real relative naming scheme (as outlined above) in the first place. --- or perhaps i'm just getting too old for revolutionary changes? anybody else having some views on this? frank