This report has two objectives:
By adopting certain LaTeX commands, immediate observance of certain guidelines becomes possible without further effort on the writer's part. For each stylistic point we make where LaTeX helps in this way, we will also explain how to use LaTeX to get the desired effect. Those familiar with LaTeX thus may skip over `how-to' sections.
All you need to compose a LaTeX text is a basic ASCII text editor. One that carries out matching of parentheses, brackets etc. is a bonus.
It is essential, when writing documents for EAGLES, that you realise that your documents will be used as a basis for producing both PostScript versions for printing and HTML versions (at present, until DSSSL/XML become stable and widely known) for mounting on the World Wide Web. Given the current lack of expressivity of HTML, not everything that one can accomplish in LaTeX is easily converted to HTML. Thus, writers must be aware that certain compromises have to be reached to allow a dual-path publication strategy. This applies particularly to linguistic structures (trees, features structures, etc.) that one may wish to include. In several cases, in order to achieve a suitable work-around, it is necessary to duplicate material in a slightly differnt format for both LaTeX and HTML environments. As neither the WG Editors nor the Editorial Board have the manpower or time available to carry out wholesale duplication and subsequent modification of affected material, it is up to individual authors to help by following the guidelines in this document, thus ensuring that their documents can be more easily processed and especially more straightforwardly converted to HTML.
A special case concerns (large) appendices (e.g. annotated text fragments, exemplary lists of feature structures for various phenomena, i.e. with little or no intervening text). Here, we propose not to convert such material to HTML, but simply to provide a ftp-able PostScript file, thus there is no need to take care of rendering such usually voluminous material more suitable for HTML conversion. Our reasoning is that such material is likely to be consulted off-line in any case.