12AX7
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Something that may be of interest to Prepublications
Not sure how many of you are even aware of it...
LaTeX
It's widely used among physicists, mathematicians, probably programmers and others, probably mainly due to its excellent handling of equations, but
relatively unknown elsewhere.
I mention this because, I firmly believe that LaTeX (and its relations) are the only true way to get Really Nice documents.
Yes, you can convey content in something like Microsoft Word (scoff!), but it takes an awful lot of work to make a really *good* looking document.
Plus, it's hardly a general purpose environment, with little support for global formatting rules, modular design, instantly updating embedded content,
and PDF is a second-class format. Preferred LaTeX use today is direct from, and to, PDF. If you have, say, a standard clause to add to your
documents, you can simply include a file. If your images change, you just compile the document again, no fishing through embedded objects. Embedding
PDF? Native support. Tired of embedded objects screwing up your text flow, wrapping over pages, and so on? LaTeX formats it all for you.
The major downside is, LaTeX is markup, and as such, resembles programming. (Turing-complete constructs are available to literally program, but for
the casual author, most operations are already taken care of and all you have to do is use them.) It does take months to become fluent as an author,
perhaps years if you wish to program in it.
The best part of LaTeX is, as free software, it has a huge online user base. Chances are, if you have a problem, ten other people have posted about
it and gotten useful answers. And since StackOverflow exploded, half of those answers are literally at your fingertips to copy.
So, for those of you who consider content more important than form, if you're even still reading, don't bother allowing me to waste your time further
-- text files and Word documents are fine for you. For those who want to just absolutely blow away their readers with journal-grade publications, and
who have a knack for coding, give LaTeX a try, you will like it.
For Windows users, the standard distribution is MikTeX:
http://miktex.org/
Version 2.9 includes an editor (TexWorks), but its features are kind of limited. I prefer TexMaker, which is up to v3.5.2:
http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/
I've been using it since v1.6 (holey moley, five years old), and it's feature-rich, with shortcuts to almost every built-in command, command
autocompletion, spell checking, advanced editing features, and a built-in PDF viewer. After installing MikTeX, TexMaker should autodetect it, and you
should be able to write and compile documents right away.
Tim
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watson.fawkes
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I use TeXnicCenter. It's fine for me, because I run Windows and don't need Unicode support.
I've never needed to typeset chemistry, but I still use LaTex on a regular basis.
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IrC
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I first encountered LaTeX in the mid 90's at XXX.LANL.GOV where I spent endless hours downloading files related to many areas of science. I agree with
Tim it's a great language.
Forgot to ask but along these lines, what do people think of Ghostscript? I like it.
[Edited on 11-12-2012 by IrC]
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" Richard Feynman
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kavu
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I have used LaTeX to write my bachelor thesis in organic chemistry. This was a laborious task as LaTeX does not work all that well with graphics. I
had hard time tweaking schemes and structures to fit in their right places. WYSIWYG editors help with graphics as you can see the pictures as you
write. As much as I enjoy writing math/physics with LaTeX, I'm not entirely convinced of its use in (organic) chemistry. What I'm thinking of doing in
my masters is to write the basic backbone in Word adding chemdraw drawings in it and then converting the whole thing to LaTeX.
[Edited on 13-11-2012 by kavu]
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The_Davster
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So if understand this correctly, in prepub, we have people submit in Latex, and then the Latex program formats this into a general standard?
Part of me likes this idea, because when I write papers I hate formatting them.
Part of me dislikes this because I know nothing of coding.
My preferred method in graduate school was writing the paper with no formatting in word, and giving it to my undergrad to format to journal
guidelines. 
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12AX7
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Could be done either way -- if people just want to write content and have others pretty up the source -- but in the process of writing the content I'd
be willing to bet the formatting will be pretty good as-is (assuming nothing catastrophic happened, like all the figures flushed to the end of the
article).
I don't find graphics hard to use; floats work nicely. Text flowing around a narrow picture (wrapfig package) sucks though. I guess it's good enough
that no one has really improved it or written another, or maybe it's about all one can do with the built-in drivers the way they are.
Tim
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watson.fawkes
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Quote: Originally posted by The_Davster  | So if understand this correctly, in prepub, we have people submit in Latex, and then the Latex program formats this into a general standard?
Part of me likes this idea, because when I write papers I hate formatting them.
Part of me dislikes this because I know nothing of coding. |
The best thing about LaTeX is that it makes work
look professional, because that's what the professionals use. If you look at the ACS site, there's a standard LaTeX template that they require for
journal submissions. Every professional journal in technical fields that I've looked at does likewise. I don't see a need for a standard
ScienceMadness format specifically; if that's desirable, there's always the ACS one.
While LaTex is at base a formal language for describing typesetting, in practice it acts much more as a markup language, as HTML is. The basics,
enough for most applications, are pretty straightforward.
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