I understand that \bf
and \it
are now obsolete in LaTeX and that \textbf
and \textit
are proper, as they produce more sophisticated (in particular, cumulative and properly kerned) changes to font style. I have read the English version of "Obsolete commands and packages", v. 1.8.5.7 of l2tabu, Sec. 2.1 and I understand the rules and their reasons, as well as the several other commands that are affected.
However, I find it convenient to use LaTeX for notetaking during lectures, and in that rushed environment, shortening a command by any number of keystrokes helps keep me from falling behind. \bf
and its two-letter kin are still very useful to me for that reason, and once a presentation is finished I can go through and replace all appearances of \bf
et al. with \textbf
et al.
My question is this: is there a plan eventually to replace the short font style commands like \bf
with the implementations of \textbf
etc. some day, or should I expect \bf
always to remain in existence but obsolete, for reasons of backward compatibility with original TeX? Original TeX has been greatly improved on in countless ways, but in the heat of transcription I sometimes miss its conciseness.
\let\tt\texttt
and you will be ok.\let\tt\ttfamily
!\tt
has the clear advantage to switch to a fully defined font, which is not achieved by\ttfamily
but rather by\normalfont\ttfamily
(as done not by LaTeX format, but by LaTeX standard classes when providing a\tt
macro; I am skipping here math mode discussion). Why do people hate\tt
will remain an eternal mystery to me. KOMA-script turned it into an error in recent releases, breaking old, possibly useful packages, now unmaintained, which used it. Is this reasonable? No.