Re: OT: Latex Help

>I suspect it's not longtable's fault but one of the other packages you
>use. For instance gb4e.sty, which is used for interlinears, has a
>serious flaw that can break an astonishing number of packages. Gb4e's
>flaw is that it makes superscript (^) and subscript (_) work outside of
>mathmode. By commenting out the lines[*] in gb4e.sty that does this,
>suddenly other packages stop complaining.
>
>
>
[snip]

>The thing to do is start with the full document, then comment out all
>the packages (except longtable) and turn the other pcakages on, one by
>one. You might have to comment out pieces of text that uses the
>packages too...
>
>
 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.

Reply