[OS X TeX] Problems customizing report.cls

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Fri Apr 15 12:26:52 EDT 2005


Le 15 avr. 05, à 17:37, Daryl Basil Biberdorf a écrit :

> 1. What does \p@ do? I'm just not seeing what this does,
> and it's not discussed in the LaTeX Companion. Web searches
> are useless thus far.

Regarding that question alone: \p@ = 1pt, \z@ = 0pt, \@M = 10000, \m at ne 
= -1, and so forth. These are tricks used inside the definition of the 
LaTeX format, and dating back to plain TeX, to make the execution of 
commands faster. I never really understood why this actually makes 
things faster. For the speed of modern computers it doesn't seem so 
significant any more anyway.

 From latex.ltx:

\chardef\@ne=1
\chardef\tw@=2
\chardef\thr@@=3
\chardef\sixt@@n=16
\chardef\@cclv=255
\mathchardef\@cclvi=256
\mathchardef\@m=1000
\mathchardef\@M=10000
\mathchardef\@MM=20000

and later:

\countdef\m at ne=22 \m at ne=-1

and even later:

\newdimen\p@ \p@=1pt % this saves macro space and time
\newdimen\z@ \z@=0pt % can be used both for 0pt and 0
\newskip\z at skip \z at skip=0pt plus0pt minus0pt

Bruno Voisin

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