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Editorial: Editing Journals and
Proceedings with LaTeX
The
2007-2 issue is not a very big one (is it because
it's the busiest period of the year?). We did manage,
however to get some interesting and, hopefully, useful
material.
The theme
of the issue was "TeX for Editors" and I'm happy to see
that all the papers are quite closely related to the
topic. Two of the articles are related to the
bibliographies in LaTeX. One is about a very useful
package (for editors and publishers, mainly),
pdfpages, and the other describes how an
electronic journal, The PracTeX Journal,
works.
Theme: Tools for
LaTeX and TeX Users
Editor: Francisco Reinaldo
In recent years
there has been increasing development of
text/table/graphic editing tools for LaTeX and
TeX. Consequently, easy-to-use tools that can
be accessed by a graphical user interface (GUI) are
becoming more popular and many are currently available on
the web. Tools such as JabRef (Java GUI front end
for managing BibTeX and other bibliographies), LyX
(a GUI word processor that uses LaTeX for printing and
supports structural editing of LaTeX markup), and others
are emerging as major players in the GUI tools area.
The PracTeX Journal Issue 2007-3 has the theme, "Tools
for LaTeX and TeX Users". The intention is to
present ideas on the development of, and experiences on
the use of, these tools.
The scope of the issue includes, but is not limited to
:
- tools that assist the author in preparing graphics,
indexes, bibliographies, and other parts of
documents;
- previews, and PostScript/PDF manipulation
tools;
- free or almost free tools;
- cross-platform tools.
We encourage you to submit original papers describing
your experiences using LaTeX and TeX tools, and also
papers on tool development work in progress or
completed.
--Submission Guidelines:
If you would like to submit an article or technical note
for publication please contact the editors pracjourn@tug.org. We will
work with you to prepare the article. Also see http://tug.org/pracjourn/submit.html
for the Journal's guidelines.
-- Important Dates (extended):
Paper submission deadline: July 22, 2007
Publication date: August 22, 2007
-- News
PracTeX Journal is receiving papers not only in English but
also in Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Chinese,
Korean, Romanian and Italian languages. Please, contact the
editors in English.
Best Regards,
Francisco Reinaldo
2007-3 Issue Editor
Of course, first of all I would like
to thank the authors for the time and effort they spent
to write such interesting articles.
As for any issue, an
essential part of the work was done by the production
editors, which, in this particular case, were Lance
Carnes, Francisco Reinaldo, Yuri
Robbers and myself. Being myself a
beginner in all the editing business, I couldn't
make it without the constant help and
encouragements of Lance, Rei and Yuri. Many thanks for
that.
Many thanks also to the
reviewers and proofreaders who checked the articles and
sent comments and corrections.
Special thanks, also, to
Dave Walden who keeps entertaining us with
his interesting Travels in Tex Land (this time he's
visiting the ConTeXt region).
A common misconception is that
if you want to edit a journal or some proceedings
with TeX you should absolutely have to be at
least a TeXnician, if not a TeX wizard. I
don't really think this assumption is correct.
Definitely, you do need some expertise, but not
much more than that. And you must have a methodical
approach.
If the journal is
already set to be used with LaTeX, and you have all
the class and style files you need, your task is not very
difficult. If you have to start from scratch, then you
will have to take a number of decisions:
- format of articles:
Sometimes, the paper size is imposed from
typographical reasons, however, the exact dimensions of
the text, of the header and footer, margins,
separations of header and footer are for you to decide.
A very useful package to help you do all that is
geometry,
available from CTAN.
- fonts: By default,
the fonts used by LaTeX are Computer Modern. These
are bitmap fonts and do not produce a very good result
when printed, especially when some sort of scaling is
involved. It is preferable, therefore, to use some
Postscript fonts. If the journal doesn't have many
mathematical formulae, there are several very good free
Postscript fonts you can use (Times, Palatino,
Helvetica, ...). Unfortunately, usually, when these
fonts are loaded, only the text font of the document is
changed, while the mathematical font remains the same,
namely Computer Modern and, in most situations, the two
don't match very well. There are, however, some
compromise solutions, for instance using Times for text
and Mathptm for math. There are, also, some commercial
mathematical fonts to be used with Times, for instance
Mathtime, or the fonts designed to accompany the
Mathematica software. Finally, there exist complete
sets of fonts for TeX and LaTeX, containing
both text and math fonts (such as Lucida
Bright).
- Once these two important global choices have been
made, several other choices have to be made as
well:
- the layout of the title page of an article, as well
as the layout of section titles;
- the layout of tables and figures;
- the layout of the reference list;
- the contents of the header and footer (you can use,
for instance, the package fancyhdr, available from
CTAN);
- what graphics file formats are acceptable and how
to include them.
Once these decisions have been made, is time to
prepare the class or style file. First of all, you
have to decide which version of TeX is
acceptable for the papers submitted. You will, most
probably, only accept LaTeX. However, depending on
your expertise and available time, you may as well decide
to accept other TeX versions, such as
Plain TeX or ConTeXt. In any case, LaTeX
cannot be excluded. I will assume that the natural
choice is to work (at least) with LaTeX.
There are, basically, two roads you can take from here.
Either you build your own class file, starting from
scratch, or you take a class file which is close to your
needs and you modify it. The first way, making your own
class file in my opinion, is only for experts; if
you don't know the inner mechanism of LaTeX
it is quite difficult to get by. I, therefore,
strongly recommend the second way, adapting an
existing class file.
There are some issues that you will have to deal with
before starting to work on the class file. First of all,
there is the problem of copyright. It is part of
the LaTeX policy to allow the modifications of
class and style files, provided they are not
distributed under the original name, and that the
original source is acknowledged. So, from this point of
view, you are on the safe side if you play by the rules.
Secondly, it is a good strategy to choose as a
starting point a class file that was originally
designed for a journal (or several journals), such as
amsart.
The reason is that you will need an entire series
of commands that are not available in the standard
article class ,
for example, commands for volume, issue, year, etc.
And now comes the hard work. You will have to deal with
some characteristics of TeX and LaTeX which are not
familiar to the casual user, or even to more advanced
users, if they only use LaTeX to write articles or books.
There is a chapter in LaTeX Companion (by
Mittelbach, et al.; see http://www.tug.org/books)
explaining the structure of a class file. You may want to
read it before you start. Anyway, all you have to do is
figure out where in the document is the thing you want to
change and how to change it, to adapt it to your needs.
An excellent guide on document class internals is
the article Rolling your
own Document Class: Using LaTeX to keep away from the
Dark Side, by Peter Flynn, published in the
2006-4
issue of The PracTeX Journal.
The last step you have to perform is to prepare the
interaction with your authors. It is preferable, if you
have enough time, to prepare a list of exigencies for the
submitters. You have to be as specific as possible. In my
opinion, at least the following points should be
touched:
- the format of the source file: don't say only
"LaTeX", but also mention the version and, preferably,
forbid the use of the obsolete LaTeX 2.09;
- general style aspects: avoid the use of
non-standard package files, avoid redefinition of
commands (even shortcuts: the modern word processors
have shortcut keys, so there is no need redefine the
commands to save key strokes);
- the use of the sectioning commands should be
compulsory; in particular, you should absolutely forbid
the redefinition of sectioning commands;
- strongly recommend the use of the theorem
and similar environments; try to provide a
proof
environment and insist that the authors use
it;
- forbid the use of vertical spacing commands
(\vskip, \bskip, \vfill), as well as commands for line
or page breaking;
- when it comes to graphics, as I said, try to be
specific: specify exactly what graphic formats are
acceptable (depending on the format you are using: PDF
or PS); if the authors provide bitmap graphics, be sure
they are aware that the resolution should be at
least 300dpi to ensure good quality printouts;
also, specify what packages should be used to include
graphic files; discourage the use of obsolete packages,
such as epsbox or others of the same kind;
- don't allow changing the fonts of the document;
this is something you do, through the class
file you defined.
Many journals have article templates. Personally, I
don't think they are necessarily a good idea. I would
rather prefer that authors use the standard article document class,
which, definitely, they know better, than to try to use a
class which is new to them. I have always considered that
it is a lot easier to make the (usually small)
modifications to adapt a standard article to the rules of
a new class, than to try to correct the inherent errors
committed by those who attempt to use the
template.
Paul Blaga
2007-2 Issue Editor
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