[texhax] Long-term stability of LaTeX documents?

[Barbara Beeton]

more from niall mansfield:

    (This follows on from my previous posting
    "Page dimensions differ when LaTeX run on different host",
    where the same doc on one host is 470 pages, but 530 on another.)

    I'm working on a book in LaTeX, which will I hope have future editions
    (this is 2nd ed, first was in MS-Word!!!), so it's important that when
    LaTeXed in two years time, I get identical output.  How can I
    guarantee that, even if we upgrade our LaTeX or Linux distribution, or
    perhaps change to a different platform?

    The only way I can see of doing this is to use the 'snapshot' and
    'bundledoc' packages, and permanently store all the style files used
    with the book's .tex manuscript.  Is that silly?

not at all silly.  the snapshot package
provides the necessary version information
(but beware of files that don't include
\ProvidesPackage information -- those
really do need to be stored with the .tex
file(s) for the book).  you then have the
option of archiving multiple versions of
packages separately from the book (one
copy of each version) or bundling all the
files used for the book together.  if you
anticipate a platform change, bundling
is probably safer even though it requires
more storage space.
							-- bb