Elementary varieties and existence of flat covers (Q734767)

The author introduces the notion of an elementary category. This is a variant of Crawley-Boevey's definition of locally finitely presented category (or, by using the notation of Adamek and Rosicky) finitely accessible category. The main difference is that a ``finitely presented object'' \(E\) on an elementary category satisfies that the canonical map \[ \varinjlim\Hom_{\mathcal A}(E,A_i)\to \Hom_{\mathcal A}(E,\varinjlim A_i) \] is just surjective (instead of bijective). The author proves that this alternate definition suffices to define the usual notion of purity in finitely accessible categories. And then he proves that flat covers do always exist in such categories.