Some TeX Developments

I’ve had a a few questions about the achemso bundle concerning creating references such as “Figures 1 to 3” automatically. The problem has been that I’ve been using the varioref package to turn \ref{some-fig} in “Figure 1” automatically, rather than having to put Figure~\ref{some-fig}. Unfortunately, varioref does not handle multiple references in an automated fashion.

For version 3.4 of achemso (which I’ve just sent to CTAN), I’ve switched to the cleveref package. This means that you can now write something like \ref{fig-1,fig-2,fig-3} and get “Figures 1 to 3” without further effort. I hope that this makes life much easier for users, although it does mean that there is another package required to use achemso. I think that this is the right balance: I’m sure users will let me know if I’ve got it wrong.

I’ve had a few e-mails recently from users of my achemso and rsc packages, complaining that they get an empty first entry in the bibliography. Some of the users have noticed that it seems to be linked to the special control citation that both packages use. However, this is not a bug in either bundle, but is because the users have done a self-install of the packages.

In both cases, the LaTeX packages are designed to work with matching BibTeX styles. What tends to happen is people install the LaTeX stuff manually, but forget the BibTeX part. So the wrong .bst files get used by BibTeX, and odd results are seen. So my advice is, if you update anything by hand, make sure you install all of the update and not just some of it!

My achemso package has evolved over time to work quite well for submitting papers to the American Chemical Society (ACS). However, I still get feedback about issues with the submission system. A lot of this comes from the fact that I write the package without any direct input from the ACS. So any issues tend to be brought up by users. The ACS publish around 30 journals, each with its own rules, and I have to work out what each one wants! Not an easy task: I’ve submitted to a couple, and never as the lead author. It’s a challenge, but I hope that I’m doing more good than harm.