Hi, I'm preparing a thesis report in LaTeX. I don't want to use the memoir class as I would like total control. I have two questions:

1. My thesis consists of an introduction and then a series of articles pasted one after the other. Thus each article has its own abstract, introduction, etc... and a bibliography at its end. I understand that perhaps a package like multibib can help when we have multiple bibliographies. The idea that I came with is to write each article separately and then use pdfpages to combine the final document. Long time ago dvi files concatenation was popular but with graphics I think that pdfpages is better.

   I saw that another package exists, named combine which can help with what I am doing. I'm still exploring my options. Any suggestions?

2. If I decide to use a book class instead to make my thesis resemble more into a book-like format which is better, then using the book class format gives me section headings like 0.1 Introduction with the leading 0. This 0 doesn't show in the article class format. How to change this default book class numbering format so that I'll have e.g. 1. Introduction?

Thanks a lot...