Matching my output to the requirements of the journal is the worst of them.

I spent a lot of time learning LaTeX in order to make my documents look good.

But now I find that journals require me to make changes to my document which, in almost every instance, damage the appearance and intelligibility of the document.

For example: for an article I’m preparing now, I must:

• turn off hyphenation and full justification
• turn off all formatting for section headings (all caps only for top-level section marks)
• place awkward placeholders for images, of the type [INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE]

Some of these (the last in particular) I don’t even know how to do in LaTeX. Indeed, the last requirement is, for me, the most noxious: I imagine the reviewer would far rather have the figure close at hand in the text, rather than having to page-down to see the figure, and then page-up to get back to the argument.

What’s the rationale? Are these attempts to mitigate the potential damage which comes from over-fine control in MS Word?

(Note: for the rest of the changes, I used the following:

\usepackage[none]{hyphenat}
\usepackage{ragged2e}

\usepackage{sectsty}
\sectionfont{\mdseries\MakeUppercase} % All caps, middle weight
\subsectionfont{\mdseries} % middle weight

)

I’ve spent most of today listening to my robotic overlord (his name is Alan) read out chunks of my thesis in the vain hope that I would better spot typos or errors that way. The idea — far too good to be my own, and I think stolen from Nick Anstead — is better in theory than in practice.

The rest of the day has been spent battling for BibTeX style files, and finally making up my own. I never realized how many bibliographic choices one has until I had to sit through the custom-bib dialog. Editor names reversed or firstname lastname? Proceedings and Collections in quotes or not? Years in brackets? Unfortunately, no optimal solution is known to exist: congealed preferences (mine and publishers’) seem to dominate.

Oh, I must just say a couple of things: Wheats is teh awsumz, David was never quiet, my flatmates suffered, and Bianca might even make it to the defence.

That is all. Goodnight.