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> What? The journal provides (or at least should) a latex template, you write stuff in that, then you ship it. Last one I wrote in a browser through overleaf, s

> What? The journal provides (or at least should) a latex template, you write stuff in that, then you ship it. Last one I wrote in a browser through overleaf, spent zero time on formatting. Then you don't have much experience writing papers. Formatting is very time consuming. Some want 8 pages, some are unlimited, others want you to use whatever makes sense. Every journal has a different page length. They expect to see results in different places. Some want a detailed appendix. Others are ok with a website. The latex template doesn't help at all with any of these. Reformatting is extremely painful and wasteful.

JonChesterfield 3y ago
Three in the real world, some number in undergrad. Writing papers takes a fair amount of time - think how to express things, producing graphs and so forth - but reordering sections or adding things to a bibliography is yet to cause much grief. Maybe we mean different things by formatting.
IshKebab 3y ago
The worst thing is references. They all have their own weird formats.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Why isn't that handled by semantic markup? That said, recognising static academic reference format, then reformatting for the other 4 or 5 standard formats seems like a python project for first year students (to this non-programmer, I'd guess there are lots of edge cases to trip on making it a great learning experience!)?
  - cge 3y ago
    It often isn't so much the actual bibliography line item format, which are usually handled quite well be systems like bibtex or biblatex+biber, but overall citation formatting complexities. Sometimes journals want specific formats that become a challenge to implement. For example, on a recent submission, we needed our main text to have a numbered bibliography at the end, then needed our methods to have numbered bibliography at the end, but with numbers starting after the last number in the main text, and no repeats, but with references in the methods to items already in the main text bibliography referring to those numbers. This was surprisingly difficult to implement reliably in LaTeX and Biblatex. An additional annoyance is that to save space, journals often want formats that are compact but inefficient to use, for example, formats that are heavily abbreviated and don't include titles. These, however, are annoying to use, and annoying reviewers is generally unwise. So in our case, we actually intentionally submit PDFs for review that use the 'wrong' bibliography item format, of a similar form to the journal's but less abbreviated and including titles and hyperlink backreferences to citations in the text. Then for final submission we have to replace this with the journal's preferred format.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  Now that is a solved problem. The issues the grandparent post raises about rewriting the text to be shorter or longer are real, but changing to a totally different reference format is what Latex does automagically for you when you apply the publisher's template - I can't recall the last time when I even looked at what a publication's reference format is, I have the list of sources in bibtex and whatever their template outputs should be correct, and if something in the format was difficult to implement in Latex, well, that was their problem for whoever made that template back when they did it.

JonChesterfield 3y ago

Three in the real world, some number in undergrad. Writing papers takes a fair amount of time - think how to express things, producing graphs and so forth - but reordering sections or adding things to a bibliography is yet to cause much grief. Maybe we mean different things by formatting.

IshKebab 3y ago

The worst thing is references. They all have their own weird formats.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Why isn't that handled by semantic markup? That said, recognising static academic reference format, then reformatting for the other 4 or 5 standard formats seems like a python project for first year students (to this non-programmer, I'd guess there are lots of edge cases to trip on making it a great learning experience!)?
- cge 3y ago
  It often isn't so much the actual bibliography line item format, which are usually handled quite well be systems like bibtex or biblatex+biber, but overall citation formatting complexities. Sometimes journals want specific formats that become a challenge to implement. For example, on a recent submission, we needed our main text to have a numbered bibliography at the end, then needed our methods to have numbered bibliography at the end, but with numbers starting after the last number in the main text, and no repeats, but with references in the methods to items already in the main text bibliography referring to those numbers. This was surprisingly difficult to implement reliably in LaTeX and Biblatex. An additional annoyance is that to save space, journals often want formats that are compact but inefficient to use, for example, formats that are heavily abbreviated and don't include titles. These, however, are annoying to use, and annoying reviewers is generally unwise. So in our case, we actually intentionally submit PDFs for review that use the 'wrong' bibliography item format, of a similar form to the journal's but less abbreviated and including titles and hyperlink backreferences to citations in the text. Then for final submission we have to replace this with the journal's preferred format.
PeterisP 3y ago
Now that is a solved problem. The issues the grandparent post raises about rewriting the text to be shorter or longer are real, but changing to a totally different reference format is what Latex does automagically for you when you apply the publisher's template - I can't recall the last time when I even looked at what a publication's reference format is, I have the list of sources in bibtex and whatever their template outputs should be correct, and if something in the format was difficult to implement in Latex, well, that was their problem for whoever made that template back when they did it.