Re: .ltx vs. .tex (was INSTALL.tex)

["Justin C. Walker" <justin@mac.com>]

On Tuesday, November 26, 2002, at 12:09 PM, Leonhard Möhring wrote:

> At 10:22 26.11.2002 -0800, you wrote:
[snip]
> > > This is a TeX file, not a LaTeX file.
> > > You must use tex INSTALL.tex. If you latex I get the same warning as 
> > > you.
> > >
> > > There is a .ltx extension, while almost never used, would allow to 
> > > distinguish between
> > > LaTeX and TeX files.
> >
> > That would help, but as you say, noone uses it.  I need to learn how 
> > to distinguish them for myself, clearly.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Justin
>
>
> As a fairly sound guess, if it starts with \documentclass[..]{....}
> (or \documentstyle[..]{..} for old LaTeX), and maybe \usepackage{...}
>  and has a lot of \begin{...} .... \end{..} clauses, you can be
> quite sure it's LaTeX.
>
> But even if you decided it to be LaTeX, you need to check if it 2.09
> or 2\epsilon and if you decided it's not LaTeX you can't be sure it's
> plain, since there are quite a lot of other macro packages going
> around (AMS-TeX springs to my mind).
>
> So even if ppl would use .ltx and .tex you still wouldn't be sure how
> to treat those files without having a look at them (or checking some
> readme which lies in the vicinity). I doubt that the usage of .ltx would
> help the TeX community much, but that's just my two cents.

It's getting so that writing good documentation is as much troubXXXXXfun 
as programming.  Whatever happened to WYSIWYG?  :-}.

Regards,

Justin

--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large  *
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