Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!clyde.concordia.ca!mcgill-vision!quiche!opus!clement From: clement@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Clement Pellerin) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: doing a \ref{} in a \caption of a figure in LaTeX Summary: protect is a hack Message-ID: <2419@opus.cs.mcgill.ca> Date: 5 Nov 90 19:05:06 GMT References: <1232@lehi3b15.csee.Lehigh.EDU> <1990Nov4.203542.18675@csrd.uiuc.edu> Reply-To: clement@opus.UUCP (Clement Pellerin) Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada Lines: 19 In article <1990Nov4.203542.18675@csrd.uiuc.edu> (Victor Eijkhout) writes: >Should I say RTFM? On page 59 of the LaTeX book it says about >the argument of a \caption command: >``This is a moving argument, so fragile commands must be \protect-ed'' >And just what is the fragile command here? On page 72 it says: >``The \ref and \pageref commands are fragile'' >I mean, there is a good book about LateX, so if the combination >of two commands goes wrong, you look both of them up in it, right? If people put as much energy in fixing \protect as they put in explaining it, we would have got rid of it ages ago. Even if you RTFM, you cannot understand what are fragile commands in moving arguments until you know quite a lot of TeX internal workings. Fortunately, the implementors of latex 2.10 are trying to remove it. -- news