[texhax] Calss file

Christopher W. Ryan cryan at binghamton.edu
Tue Jun 3 10:19:49 CEST 2003


Some more general or philosophical LaTeX questions, that come to mind as I read
this:

I think I understand the concept behind LaTeX:  write your content, label the
structure of your document (headings, etc), and then let the publisher worry
about how the structure should appear on the printed page (headings bold, or
italic, or whatever; text 2-column or one column, etc.)  In this way, a single
manuscript could be submitted to two different journals just fine, without the
author having to adjust them to adhere to each publisher's requirements; that
would be automatically taken care of if the publisher applies its own style.

However, that being said, most journal publishers in my field (medicine) want
to receive a paper manuscript (often along with an electronic file on disk) as
the first step.  This manuscript and its copies are sent to reviewers for a
publication decision.  This paper copy does not look anything like the article
might eventually look in the pages of the journal.  Usually they want it
single-column, double-spaced, 10-12 pt font, 1 inch margins, no fancy-appearing
 headings,   . . . . all in all fairly "plain."

One can't submit the raw text file with all the LaTeX markup commands in it.
Is there a "package" that will produce this sort of plain, basic,
manuscript-for-submission output?  If the manuscript gets accepted, then the
publisher could apply some other package to it to make it look pretty for final
appearance in the journal.

And, I found the CTAN archives fairly difficult to search.  Difficult for me to
tell, based on the snippet description, what some of the packages do, without
going several menus "deep" to find the readme files.  Is there a way to make
them more self-explanatory?

Lastly, anyone know of any packages specifically for biomedical journals?
Seems like most of them relate to physics, math, engineering.  Maybe this is a
natural result of LaTeX's mathematical heritage.

Thanks.

--Chris
--
Christopher W. Ryan, MD
SUNY Upstate Medical University Clinical Campus at Binghamton
and Wilson Family Practice Residency
40 Arch Street, Johnson City, NY  13790
cryanatbinghamtondotedu
Public key generated with PGP 602i available at
http://home.stny.rr.com/ryancw/PGP602ipublickey.html
or via http://wwwkeys.us.pgp.net:11371

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the
work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless
sea."  [Antoine de St. Exupery]


On Tue, 3 Jun 2003 11:36:30 +0200, Philip G. Ratcliffe wrote:
 . . . .
>I have to disagree, in principle.  There's a great deal of work to
>writing
>real packages and many (very many) already exist.  The beginner
>would much
>better be encouraged to root around in CTAN and find out what's
>already
>available; an enourmous fraction of replies to questions in this and
>other
>lists are of the form: "take a look at xyz package."





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