[pracjourn-forum] Re: Pitfalls (was: Some initial thoughts

[Karl Berry]

    Could the list at http://www.ucc.ie:8080/cocoon/cc/elec-pub/latex/howto
    (which I cobbled together from Christina's excellent 
    set of comments) form a basis for this?

It seems like a very nice start.  Naturally I can't resist comments:

- What's wrong with \pounds?  (Maybe links to fuller
  explanations are desirable in some cases.)

- Not sure helico-pter is the best example of hyphenation.  That is an
  extremely weird/wrong hyphenation in US English.  How about an example
  that is the same in US and UK, e.g., data-base?  Ghost-script?  (And
  this points that giving the command to set hyphenation would be
  valuable.)

- Instead of mentioning \verb solely for _, I suggest just mentioning
  \verb and \begin{verbatim} (and alltt?) separately.  People do need
  every character in verbatim mode, but it's rather a different case
  than getting the chars in roman.

- Instead of "Reserved Characters" for the first heading, I suggest
  "Special Characters", and add one more entry: "for 8-bit
  (pre-accented) characters, use \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} (or
  latin2 or ...)" ...or whatever we're supposed to do these days.

- The image of the top of a browser window (or whatever it is) seems a
  bit odd as an example of leaders.

    As this is a discrete task, not actually bound to the
    PracJourn work, I suggest we take it to a forum of its
    own (eg pitfalls at tug.org or something...Karl?)

If there's a lot of people here who don't want to be in on this, it
would make sense.  But I suspect the 12 or so of us on this list are all
interested.

    I suggest the first step would be to ensure the list of
    reserved characters is bulletproof, so that anyone following

I don't see any others on my keyboard for plain and LaTeX.
Does ConTeXt reserve other characters?

k