On Sat, Aug 01, 2009, Blake McBride wrote: > MOM has main headings, sub-headings, and paragraph headings. Each has it's > own set of macros, and there is a limited number of levels. Is there a > reason for this? MM has it generalised. It uses fewer macros and goes to > more levels. I don't understand this?
Partly, it's a design decision, based on mom's "target audience". >From the docs: "...mom originally came into being to serve the needs of creative writers (i.e. novelists, short story writers, etc.--not to cast aspersions on the creativity of mathematicians and programmers)..." Non-tekkies, in other words. Users more comfortable with head/subhead/parahead than h1/h2/h3, and not likely to need deeper heading levels. Partly, it's a decision based on a piece of advice that used to circulate in articles on writing basic html: "If you need more than three levels of heading, you should consider reorganizing your material." Partly, it's because of formatting issues. After 3 levels of headings, setting heading levels in a way that makes them distinguishable from each other turns into an exercise in bad typography. Not just in the body of the document, in the TOC as well. I'm aware this imposes limitations on users for whom mom "is the perfect macro set for my needs except for this one thing..." :) Provided you don't need mom's head-numbering facilities, it's trivial to write a series of wrapper macros for, say, .HEAD, that incorporate the typographic details you want for each level, e.g. .de head-1 . HEAD_FONT B . HEAD_SIZE +2 . HEAD "\\$1" .. . .de head-2 . HEAD_FONT B . HEAD_SIZE +2 . HEAD_QUAD LEFT . HEAD_CAPS off . HEAD "\\$1" .. etc. -- Peter Schaffter