Having criticised (ticked off) certain senior categorists for giving terse and uninformative answers to naive category theory questions, perhaps I ought to give more helpful responses to TeX questions. LaTeX 3 is a general and extensive re-write of LaTeX. I don't fully understand the terms of reference, though they started as making amstex work with LaTeX. Some very amateurish CDs were in amstex, so we may take it that the present objectives are to do (ie make compatible and recommend a package to do) that much, but more professionally. There were CDs in amstex because (presumably) whoever at AMS specified it considered that they were already an important mode of expression IN MATHEMATICS AS A WHOLE. Rectangular diagrams without 2-cells are very commonly found. We all know exactly what the idiomatic usage of such diagrams is and that we would be lost without them. Moreover the fact that Mike Spivak, Steven Smith, Kris Rose and I have put a lot of time into developing the matrix notation of TeXercise 18.46, that Francis Borceux came up with the same idiom without reading the TeXbook, and that large numbers of users have found these five packages convenient are evidence that this is the most appropriate way of rendering such diagrams in machine- (and, of course, user-) readable form. The strings, braids, etc., are a completely different matter. It is not belittling the work done on these topics, in Australia in particular, to say that they are of minority interest, compared to the use of the simpler forms of diagrams. Nor would I be accusing Ross of riding a bandwagon if I suggest that in five years' time he'll probably be interested in something else and drawing a completely different kind of diagram. Meanwhile others on the fringe of the expanding categorical cosmos will only just be learning to use commutative \square's. With such a major piece of programming as CD drawing, "what you see" (type) and "what you get" (see on paper) are completely different things and are to be thought of (designed) separately. For example, the diagrams in my thesis (as submitted to Cambridge in 1986) look pretty horrible, but substituting a recent version of my diagrams package (and, I confess, a little bit of global editting) yields an aesthetically far superior result for (almost) the same input. Later (say post Sept 1989) sources are adapted more easily. I have continued to support the same input language whilst developing the output. With the exception of a few details, the original language design decisions turned out to be good ones. Those who have asked me in person "how do you do this in TeX" will have found that I have tricks up my sleeve which I use in my own papers but am reluctant to explain. Other things have had loud "PROTOTYPE" warning messages in them. This is because any piece of code I give out I have a duty to maintain (in the sense I've mentioned, of continuing to parse the input and producing similar or better output), so until I'm sure that I'm happy with the input language I won't release things. Consequently I sometimes get overtaken. So the short answer to Ross's comment (at the risk of compromising my own typographical principles and contradicting Mike Barr's recent [private] comment to me, "Hell, at least we agree on TeX!" :-) ), is, you're right in sticking to MacDraw for what are for the time being ad hoc diagrams. You can use epsf.sty to import them into LaTeX documents. That is after all the modern equivalent of getting the engraver to do it. When the idiom has become clear, and you've got me sufficiently interested in the subject to want to draw the diagrams myself, then I'll write your macros. Paul ==============================================================================