Covington examples and chapter numbers

Question

I'm trying to use covington examples across multiple chapters. This defaults to giving me chapter numbers - that is, the first example in chapter 2 is (2.1). I added:

\renewcommand{\thechapter}{}

to eliminate the chapter numbers, but this just gives me (.1) instead of (2.1). Is there a way to remove the chapter numbering portion in covington?

Welcome to TeX.SE. Please post the minimal document that shows your issue. Not everybody (including me) is familiar with covington. — , Mar 28 '17 at 20:06
Try \renewcommand{\theequation}{\arabic{equation}} since equation is the counter that is used in the example environment — , Mar 28 '17 at 20:16
Don't use covington. Use gb4e or linguex instead. Or if you have sophisticated glossing needs use expex. See Numbered examples in linguistics I can refer back to — Alan Munn, Mar 29 '17 at 01:56

score 1 · Answer 1 · 2017-03-28T20:35:27.007

The covington package uses the equation counter for numbering examples.

Since theequation defaults to \thechapter.\arabic{equation} for a book - like class removing the \thechapter part from \theequation is not sufficiently done with \renewcommand{\thechapter}{}, which would be a bad idea anyway since chapters would not appear numbered at all.

The \theequation macro must be redefined:

\renewcommand{\theequation}{\arabic{equation}}

in order to 'kill' the chapter number glued to the example number.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:36

Depending on how you want your equations numbered from chapter to chapter Christian's solution may or may not work for you. By default, the book class resets the equation counter at each chapter. If you want sequentially numbered examples throughout the whole document independent of chapter, you can do the following instead:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{covington}
\usepackage{chngcntr}
\counterwithout{equation}{chapter}
\begin{document}

\chapter{A chapter}
\begin{example}
An example
\end{example}

\chapter{A chapter}
\begin{example}
An example
\end{example}

\end{document}

I would still recommend using another package for example formatting, however, since covington is really quite limited. See:

Numbered examples in linguistics that I can refer back to.

Covington examples and chapter numbers

2 Answers2