Some Other Guidelines

Here are a few other guidelines. These are mostly noted as a result of noticing issues in the existing documentation ...later, we can have a more coherent list.

• Use the \begin{verbatim} environment to format larger blocks of source code.

• Use logical rather than physical markup, for example the \emph{ ... } environment for emphasis (italics), rather than \em or \it.

• Use the \ldots macro to produce three dots (...) indicating ellipses -- if you just write three periods in a row they are spaced too closely (for example: ...).

• The latex2html program handles the mathematical typesetting from L^ATEX by including the math as a bitmap. This is reasonable for actual equations, but looks a bit odd for simple symbols in the middle of a sentence. There should be a switch to turn these into ordinary text, or in the extreme we could write alternate latex or html macros. However, if this can't be fixed, avoid using the math typesetting environments if you don't need them. For example, to produce a backslash, use \textbackslash or \verb|\| rather than $\backslash$ (since in latex2html the first two options produce a character, the third a GIF image).

• Do not use underscores in .tex filenames. Use hyphens instead (i.e. use `-' instead of `_').

Normally, a good heuristic is to copy the existing examples in the manual when writing new ones. However, much of the L^ATEX here doesn't yet take advantage of these macros. So look at the description linked above instead for now.