Re: OT: Latex Help

* Chris Bates said on 2006-09-08 10:19:16 +0200
> After experimentation, I've found that including longtable before gb4e
> solves the problem. :) Thanks for your help... although these problems
> with Latex seem to speak of a larger problem I have with its design: the
> lack of encapsulation in general. For instance, gb4e does interlinears:
> why does it affect the way text is rendered outside of the interlinears?
> And why can packages interfere with each other to such an extent? Don't
> get me wrong, I think a lot about Latex is great, it's just that (from a
> user's point of view) its design seems to betray a serious lack of
> consideration for restricting the scope of changes. A bit like a
> programming language that makes it difficult to declare local variables
> (thus forcing you to have all data as global)... or a programming
> language that doesn't allow some module or class to override default
> behavoir *only within its own code* rather than globally.
> Of course, not having looked at the code I know nothing about how its
> internals work.
There is only one scope, so any macro you make is used in the same
namespace. And yes, LaTex is a set of macros written on top of Tex, and
Tex is also an old, oldschool language. It was written for one person
and one person only: Donald Knuth. It's an accident of history that
other people started using Tex (it filled a need probably) and another
that Latex was kludged in on top of it.


t.

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