[OS X TeX] change header tableofcontents

Morten Høgholm morten.hoegholm at gmail.com
Wed Nov 30 17:10:46 CET 2005


On 11/30/05, Gary L. Gray <gray at engr.psu.edu> wrote:

[Kopka & Daly]
> "It is recommended that one should almost always take the *-version
> of these defining commands, unless there is some very good reason to
> expect that the possible arguments may be 'long', that is, contain new
> paragraphs. Long arguments should be the exception, not the rule."
>
> This is why I used the starred version of the \renewcommand. Of
> course, the unstarred version also works and I am not sure why the
> starred version is recommended -- I just like to follow the
> guidelines put down by the experts. :-) I am sure one of the experts
> on this list will be able to tell us all why the starred version is
> better in most cases (including this one).

If you use the non-starred version of \newcommand etc. you allow the
arguments to contain \par. In case you forget a closing brace when
using such a command TeX will just read the rest of the file before
coming with a "Runaway argument" error message. If you use the starred
version, TeX will complain as soon as your paragraph ends and feed you
the line number of where it went wrong.

If a user has arguments that really need to consists of several
paragraphs, chances are that the probably wanted an environment
instead.

Mort
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