Message-Id: <199401281711.AA17404@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Fri, 28 Jan 1994 17:04:56 GMT
From: David Rhead <David_Rhead@VME.CCC.NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Form and content: liaise with publishers
Status: R

>    Suppose I am undecided about whether to send a paper to journal X or
>    Y, where X and Y have different macros.

While authors such as Mike Piff may, in the short term, have to circumvent
the incompatibilities between different journal-editor's perceptions of
structure, isn't the long-term solution to:
*    COMPLAIN TO THE JOURNAL-EDITORS that they are making you go through
     these contortions.  Then, with a bit of luck (perhaps with the
     journal-editors realising that it's in their self-interest for them to
     be able to use each other's TeX macros for production purposes), ...
*    the journal-editors will talk to each other and decide that their
     structures aren't (or needn't be) all that different from each other.
     Hence ...
*    In the long-term the structures should converge (or at least there
     should be large common subsets).

E.g., 400 biomedical journals have a common set of "instructions for
authors".  If a medic has a paper rejected by one of the group, s/he can
submit it ABSOLUTELY UNCHANGED to any of the other 399.  See, for example,
British Medical Journal, New England Journal of Medicine, or any other
journal in the "Vancouver group".  (OK, they're submitting "typed
manuscripts", not .tex files.  But the editors did meet -- in Vancouver,
hence the name of the group -- and solve the medic's version of Mike's
problem.)

If hundreds of biomedical editors can converge on a common view of "the
structure of an article", WHY CAN'T THE MATHEMATICS EDITORS ALSO CONVERGE
on a common view?

In fact, I'd guess that:
*    there is already much common ground between mathematics editors about
     structure.  I'd guess that this common view goes something like
     "Generally that article structure is OK, although it lacks stuff for
     front-matter.  The AMSLaTeX stuff is pretty good as a bolt-on goodie."
*    problems can come if one journal opts for plain, and another for
     LaTeX.  E.g., physicists may not be able to submit the same .tex file
     to the Institute of Physics as to Elsevier, because the former uses
     plain and the latter uses LaTeX.
*    the LaTeX3 project could build on the existing common ground by
     involving such editors in the "definition of the LaTeX3 article
     structure".  E.g., if the LaTeX3 team could liase with the AMS,
     Elsevier and Springer (people from the first two are already on lists
     such as this, Springer are at Heidelberg whuch isn't far from Frank at
     Mainz), I'd guess that a structure-definition could be arrived at that
     would satisfy other publishers too.  At this stage Mike's problem
     would be a non-problem.

To summarize, I'd suggest that:
*  Mike complains to his target journals about any unnecessary
   incompatibility
*  the LaTeX3 project liaises with publishers, with a view to getting
   agreement about the structures that their articles have in common.

                                                                David Rhead