Frank Mittelbach wrote: > but without feedback and even if the feedback is mainly of the type, > please explain this better i don't understand, it is awfully hard to > write about this. and if i'm not able to finally get this into a shape > where most of you on the list do understand it and/or think it is > being useful this is doomed, or not? In my case, I think the general design is ok. So there is no need to comment on that. But in order to comment on the details they should be published first. You said several times that you couldn't release the code of template because it depends on some unfinished other things. Perhaps it would be a good idea to just post a list of those templates without an actual implementation, just with a description of the arguments, attributes, and semantics. Here are two (random) things I've thought of: a) General structure. IMHO LaTeX should be much more modular so you can replace parts you don't like with your own implementation. It could be divided into the kernel containing just the programming environment like xparse, etc., and a lot of modules, one for each aspect of actual typesetting (lists, math, fonts, headings, pagestyle,...). The structure of a class file would be preamble including modules declaring instances of templates defined in the modules The advantage would be that you could o make cosmetic changes by writing a new class which uses other values to instantiate the templates, and o make fundamental changes by writing a new module with different implementation of templates. b) Displays. A basic display template IMHO could have no parameters, the following attributes above-skip, below-skip, left-indent, right-indent alignment: left, right, centered, full width mode: text, math-displaystyle, math-textstyle and it would define two commands to resp. begin and end the environment. Other, more convenient templates could be defined on top of this. Unfortunately, I haven't come up with a satisfactory design of high level math environments, so far. Achim ________________________________________________________________________ _ | \_____/ | // Achim Blumensath | \ _ \O/ \___/\ | // [log in to unmask] |-< /_\ =o= \ /\ \| \X/ (p^2 - m^2)\psi = 0 |_/ \_ /"\ o----| ____________________________________________________________________\___|