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A trickle of questions is appearing concerning how to write Latex (not yet Plain Tex or Context) in conformance with some journal or book publisher's style:

  1. using AMA reference style while using the achemso.sty
  2. How to APA 6th in LaTex?
  3. Biblatex / MLA for official reports and websites

There's advantage, I think, in trying to have two tags each for these sorts of question, perhaps a [style-guides] tag for all of them, plus the specific tag for each. A way of distinguishing them is to use a contraction of the style text, so, e.g., [ama-manual], [apa-manual], or [mla-handbook].

The disadvantage is that one burns through the five available tags quickly. If we tag all qns concerned with class files [documentclass], then a simple question about making hyperlinks in references conform to a style where the user might have a problem with a conflict between the {apa} package and {apacite} might have six or more obviously desirable tags: e.g., in this case [apa apacite apa-manual documentclass hyperref references style-guides].

Postscript

As a first step towards Juan's suggestion, I've created an tag, and given it two tag synonyms for it: and . These might need moderator actions to go through, since voting for a tag synonym requires at least five upvotes in the tag, so maybe it's best if we discuss the idea a little further here.

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How about just keeping apa-style, ama-style, mla-style, etc. And none of the more specific?

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  • Are you suggesting dropping style-specific package/.bst tags, say, [apacite] as a tag, in favour of the style tag?
    – Charles Stewart
    Sep 6, 2010 at 13:11
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    Yes. It might be a problem if there are several packages to provide the same “style”, but I don't know if we really want to distinguish among all those. In the end (most likely) I don't really care about the particular package used, but about getting the appropriate style in my document.
    – Juan A. Navarro
    Sep 6, 2010 at 19:49
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Perhaps the convention should be that some of these imply others? So apacite would imply apa? The corresponding tag wiki could contain the information: "If you're searching for 'apa', consider also searching for 'apacite', or more generally for 'apa*'" (or however wildcards are done in the searches).

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  • Once the site gets big enough that people really use tags to filter what qns they see, one wants to use the most general tags possible otherwise your qn doesn't get seen by many people you want: it's SO tagging advice. It's be nice if we had such a feature as subtagging, but the "apa*" fix only works with the interesting/ignored tag lists. This consideration points, I think, of favouring [style-guides] only, and ditching the more specific tags, at least when there is tag competition.
    – Charles Stewart
    Sep 2, 2010 at 12:34

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