Talk:LaTeX default preamble

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fontenc package

This package deals with the output font encoding. One of its uses is to permit TeX to auto-hyphenate words containing accented characters, and it requires that a fontset be specified for the document that includes the necessary one-piece glyphs for the accented characters (specifically, something other than Computer Modern, which builds accented characters from multiple font glyphs). My feeling is that this is generally only a thing to consider in PP, so the package is probably superfluous for test-compilation during the formatting rounds. Dcwilson 21:59, 4 August 2009 (PDT)

Problems environment

Consistency with the "normal" DP guidelines would mean that blocks of short exercises/answers set in multicolumn format should be unwrapped as single-column lists when they emerge from the proofing rounds. If this is formatted as a standard itemize then the resulting compiled preview will probably need to be very tall ;) The Problems environment was developed to output such a list in a multicolumn format roughly approximating the original scan layout, so has the advantage of producing shorter output pages. The disadvantage is that the items are displayed numbered vertically, whereas real books often number horizontally. If we are encouraging F1 to only worry about capturing the structure of the document then this isn't really an issue. Indeed, the only justification for using the Problems environment is the shorter page output, so perhaps it belongs in the dppreview package rather than the dpformat package. Dcwilson 22:34, 4 August 2009 (PDT)

DPalign

What do people think about including dcwilson's DPalign structures? For run-in or condensed intertext it certainly works as "a less intrusive (that is, more easily adapted by the PPer) way to get the same result" as flalign* with balancing phantom text. If we are not going to include it in the preamble, I think we should certainly then discourage formatters from using the flalign* "trick". If they use align* with regular intertext instead, then the PPer can more easily switch these to DPalign* with lintertext if they prefer to match the original more closely.

My feeling is that a project-specific preamble should be relatively short, otherwise it will overwhelm the PCs. On that basis alone, anything that might be of use in more than one project and that has a substantial preamble footprint should be included in the site preamble. Perhaps a switch (\UseDPalign or something) could be set up so that a PM would have to explicitly permit use of "optional" parts of the site preamble in their project. Dcwilson 16:28, 6 August 2009 (PDT)