On 28/12/08 17:32, Esther wrote:
Scott, the idea behind style files in LaTeX is that you can easily switch formatting without having retype your paper with new formatting commands. For the main paper, you might change a single argument that lets you change the output from double-spaced manuscript mode to single-spaced, publication-ready mode (possibly formatted for 2-columns, or whatever else the journal uses). For bibliography styles, this means that you can change an argument that lets you change between referencing formats without retyping and reformatting. This might include automatically numbering references in the order in which they are used, as opposed to using alphabetical order. Or it might require the authors' names to be given in a particular order like last name, comma, first name for the first author, but successive authors listed by first name then last name. Again, the bibliography style file can keep track of the conventions, and the capitalization, font changes, hanging indents, etc.
It's perhaps worth noting that well organized WYSIWYG word processor documents also allow this to some degree.
When I last had to do academic work with Microsoft Word, I defined styles like Heading 1, Heading 2, Footnote, etc., then applied them to paragraphs. This way, if I wanted (say) to increase the size of all second-level headings, I merely had to change the Heading 2 Style in the style manager dialog, rather than each individual occurrence in the document.
Sadly, most people don't use word processors in such an organized way. -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
