Guidelines for the construction of a generating partition in the standard map

The validity of a recently developed procedure to construct a symbolic dynamics for the standard map is accurately investigated. The implications of all the stages, that involve the determination of homoclinic tangencies and the identification of appropriate symmetry lines, are discussed. Moreover, an extension of the method from the strongly to the weakly chaotic regime is presented. As a result, the general validity of the approach is strengthened, although many intermediate steps still have no rigorous justification.