modern but no TeX nor pdf
I happened to come across the webpage of the Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods (the very first time I had encountered this journal). And saw the following announcement:
Authors interested in submitting a manuscript to JMASM should follow these guidelines. Note: Submissions in Tex and .pdf are NOT acceptable.
Meaning that only MS Word manuscripts are acceptable… Sounds to me to be a bit contradictory with the “Modern” in the title, no?, unless the Modern stands for fonts! (The code used as a graphical theme for the journal heading seems to be Fortran, which also has difficulties to fit this Modern qualification.)
December 12, 2012 at 1:47 pm
point 3: “Applications of computer programming, preferably in Fortran (all other programming environments are welcome)…” looks particularly old-fashioned. I mean, just because the editor is proficient in that language (he published a monography entitled “Statistics via Monte Carlo Simulation with Fortran”) this should not make Fortran a preferable language for submissions.
December 12, 2012 at 12:47 pm
@Peter Krautzberger,
It is somewhat amazing to me that good typesetting could survive all those layers of translation, ending up at XML. Still, I guess it’s true.
I don’t know, however, how a serious publisher can put roadblocks in the way of TeX/LaTeX.
December 12, 2012 at 8:13 pm
I understand the feeling. HTML rendering engines lack significantly in typesetting quality. But I believe the future lies with HTML so I prefer to focus on improving the situation there rather than hope that TeX will ever become mainstream. (I’m seriously biased, of course, since I work for the MathJax project.)
December 12, 2012 at 10:05 am
Historians would say that anything after the Middle Ages is modern: maybe the use of print rather than scribes qualifies the journal as modern?
December 12, 2012 at 11:50 am
Or maybe they stress TeX to insist on LaTeX submissions…
December 12, 2012 at 3:06 am
The reason is usually that they have an internal XML workflow (since docx is an XML-based ISO-standard it’s easier for them to integrate that).
You could try to submit as HTML5. tex4ht and latexml are very complete tools for this — though bad TeX practices can cause trouble. Another one is Pandoc but it’s TeX support is not as complete. (Your math-mode content should end up as MathML btw.)
December 12, 2012 at 5:48 am
Thanks, I do not seriously consider submitting there, actually!