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Classes, styles, conflicts

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Classes, styles, conflicts
Subtitle
The biological realm of LaTeX
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18
Number of Parts
35
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CC Attribution - NoDerivatives 2.0 UK: England & Wales:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Production PlaceSan Francisco, California, USA

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Abstract
Every LATEX user faces the “compatibility nightmare”one day. With so much intercession capabilitiesat hand (LATEX code being able to redefine itself at will), a time comes inevitably when thecompilation of a document fails, due to a class/styleconflict. In an ideal world, class/style conflictsshould only be a concern for package maintainers,not end-users of LATEX. Unfortunately, the world isreal, not ideal, and end-user document compilationdoes break. As both a class/style maintainer and a documentauthor, I tried several times to come up withsome general principles or a systematic approach tohandling class/style cross-compatibility in a smoothand gentle manner, but I ultimately failed. Instead,one Monday morning, I woke up with this vision ofthe LATEX biotope, an emergent phenomenon whoseglobal behavior cannot be comprehended, becauseit is in fact the result of a myriad of “macro”-interactions between small entities, themselves inperpetual evolution.