Dave Armstrong wrote:

> I gave an introduction to LaTeX workshop yesterday at the ICPSR Summer
> Program that was relatively well attended.  However, I heard a rumor that
> AJPS is no longer accepting LaTeX documents and one member of the audience
> asked if this is going to become a trend among all of the major Political
> Science journals?  So I write to ask two questions:
>
> 1) Is the rumor true and if so, are we likely to see more journals heading
> in this direction?

Did AJPS ever accept .tex documents?  ISTR that they only
accepted PDFs generated by TeX, not TeX documents themselves.

> 2) What advice should I give to these folks who are getting ready to invest
> a reasonable amount of time and energy in learning the quirks and
> intricacies of LaTeX document processing?

LaTeX is still deeply worthwhile.  It's a far more organized
tool for writing, it has hugely powerful tools available (not
least BibTeX), its files won't be broken after another MS
revision, and so on.  Also keeping things in LaTeX makes it
easier to switch parts of a paper over to a pdfslide / beamer /
whatever presentation, and beamer presentations look
approximately a jillion times better than your average powerpoint.

Most of the places I've published have wanted Word files as
final manuscripts.  I'm in the Wintel world, and I've just
converted the .tex file using latex2rtf, a free/OSS utility.  It
does fine, even for math and tables, but has some limitations
with addon packages.  Mostly it just ignores them rather than
causing errors, so it's easy to live with.  Its output has
terrible formatting, but that's not generally an issue as
everything's been accepted and you're handing off to the
typesetter or copy-editor.

The only real accommodation I've had to make to the process is
entering citations manually and replacing the various \cites
with \nocites.  That is, instead of putting in:

\citeasnoun{foo1999} argued that \citeasnoun{bar2000} is a
gibbering idiot

I put that in as:

Foo (1999) \nocite{foo1999} argued that Bar (2000)
\nocite{bar2000} is a gibbering idiot

This keeps latex2rtf from getting confused about what exactly
\citeasnoun and \citeyear and so on are.

It's possible that latex2rtf has been updated to better deal
with this; there seems to be relatively consistent progress on it.

Also, you might need to convert .eps figures to something a
Word/RTF file can easily include.  This is just a matter of
opening and resaving in a graphics editor, especially since
almost everywhere wants them as separate files anyway.

Anyhow, it hasn't been a problem.  It adds ~1/2 hour to the
final stage of publishing a paper, but it seems to me that I
save more time than that along the rest of the production process.

--
James S. Coleman Battista
Dept. of Political Science, Univ. of North Texas
[log in to unmask] (940)565-4960

**********************************************************
             Political Methodology E-Mail List
        Editor: Karen Long Jusko <[log in to unmask]>
**********************************************************
        Send messages to [log in to unmask]
  To join the list, cancel your subscription, or modify
           your subscription settings visit:

          http://polmeth.wustl.edu/polmeth.php

**********************************************************