Over many years, TeX and LaTeX systems have proved successful in providing high quality, affordable typesetting from the desktop. This success has tended to disguise some of the less felicitous design decisions made in good faith in earlier days. These are now making it harder to keep LaTeX-based systems in line with user expectations, as the defaults remain rooted in a document model and a rendering which reflect the period of LaTeX¿s genesis.
Of the thousands of LaTeX packages, many have already tackled the allied problems of providing better formatting and configuration management and of adding new formatting features. This paper presents an attempt to tackle three of the more deep-seated problems: providing an improved document model, an updated rendering, and some fixes for what many users perceive (often wrongly) as bugs.
The document model is compared with current practice elsewhere in the text field, and the fixes answer some of the most common user requests from the various FAQs and questions asked on comp.text.tex. The changes are presented as a standard LaTeX2ε package which will be submitted to the CTAN when testing is complete.