Some TeX Developments

A while ago I talked about the variation between different chemistry publishers in their LaTeX support. Looking for something on the Royal Society of Chemistry site today I find that the people at Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics have created an updated template for TeX users. I’d say that is good news: remember of course that the journals are not typeset from the TeX source.

As the author of the achemso bundle (for supporting submissions to the American Chemical Society), I get a few queries about the support various publishers provide for LaTeX. Unlike more physics-focussed journals, the chemistry journals never typeset directly from authors LaTeX sources.  As a result, the acceptance of LaTeX material from authors is rather less popular, and tends to be patchy. So I thought I’d summarise things as I currently understand them.

American Chemical Society (ACS)

As I said above, I’ve written the achemso bundle specifically for submissions to the ACS. However, while the central office are happy to host a copy on their website and so on, the ACS don’t officially support the bundle. That means, in practice, that some journals are happier with LaTeX submissions than others. Each journal has its own office, and so I hear different things from people submitting to different journals. It also means that I have to pick up the requirements of each office based on feedback via authors, rather than getting any formalised instructions. There are mistakes in the achemso bundle, and there are also requirements that I don’t know about. So feedback is always useful (good or bad).

Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)

The RSC have rather less information about LaTeX on their website than the ACS. They do mention TeX, but only very briefly. I’ve written some BibTeX styles, and a very basic article template, which are available in the rsc bundle. I’ve had a bit of feedback on these, and I hope that they at least provide a starting point for writing a submission to the RSC in LaTeX. More generally, I think the best advice is to check with the editorial office for the relevant journal before writing anything, and to stick to the basic LaTeX article class when you do.

Wiley

As with the RSC, Wiley don’t have a lot of LaTeX information. What they do say is that they only accept PDF submissions: you can’t send your source. They also say to stick to the plain article class, and basically to keep things simple.

Elsevier

Elsevier have recently had a new class written for journal submissions, elsarticle. From what I can make out on their site, you can use this for most of their journals, which should include the chemistry ones. As this has actually been written for them to order, I imagine that Elsevier is the best place to be sending LaTeX submissions to. Hopefully other publishers will see that they have made life easier for their authors and will take note.

For once I have a post which combines TeX directly with my job. I’ve just received a copy of the proofs for an article in the chemistry journal Dalton Transactions (the article has DOI 10.1039/b907982c). At the top of each page I spotted

/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf/tex/latex/techbooks/als/rsc/base2006/rsc2006v1.cls
(2004/07/27 v1.0 Standard LaTeX document class for RSC Journals)

The great irony is that although the journal (along with many others in chemistry) is typeset in LaTeX, they don’t accept LaTeX submissions! I’d love to get hold of that class file and have a look: pretty much no chance, unfortunately.

I’ve just uploaded a new version of my rsc package to CTAN. There are a few improvements to the BibTeX styles the package provides (mciteplus is still supported, but is no longer mandatory), but the main change is that I’ve added a short template to the bundle. I get the occasional e-mail seeking advice about writing papers to submit to the RSC, so it seemed like a good idea to provide something a bit more formalised than the odd hint to individuals.

Of course, I don’t know what the RSC want, but I’ve got a pretty good idea about what most chemistry paper drafts look like. I’ve also got the work I’ve done on achemso to go from. The basic points are to keep it simple and not to expect “publication ready” formatting. I think this confuses a lot of people who come from a more physics-based background. A lot of physics journals typeset stuff directly from authors’ drafts, and so print-ready templates are common. On the other hand, in chemistry papers tend to be submitted in Word format and are extensively altered by the publishers. So there is no real need for print-ready material when submitting to chemistry journals.

Hopefully, the clues I’ve provided in the rsc bundle will make life a little easier for prospective authors.