Formatting for the IUMJ
Use TeX

The IUMJ accepts articles in plain TeX and in any flavor of LaTeX; the preferred formats are amsart for the body of the document and amsrefs for the bibliography. (TeX has become the de facto lingua franca within the mathematical community. Accordingly, electronic submissions in MS Word or any format other than TeX (or its derivatives) will not be accepted.)

• The best reference for Instructions for AMS document classes — we shall not replicate it here.
• The American Mathematical Society has also published author packages — look for the package for a generic journal article, which can be downloaded from here.
• The User's Guide to amsrefs version 2 is part of the amsrefs package, also available from the American Mathematical Society.

We recommend that authors who wish to submit a manuscript to the IUMJ use these packages from the American Mathematical Society.

Using TeX with XML in mind

While TeX or LaTeX are very important for distributing pages in print, their suitability for re-using, searching, enforcing standards, and interchanging digital data is limited or null. Another markup language, XML, excels at data conversion and re-purposing. The paragraph below illustrates very briefly how TeX and XML-prone authors differ as regards structuring text.

"amsart" uses slanted boldface font for subsection headings. If the key issue to an author is to render a particular heading in slanted boldface, he might call it a "subsection". Such a decision is problematical, though, when the so-called "subsection" is not a subset of a larger "section". The trouble with markup for the sake of appearance is that the result is tagged for only one presentation mode, and is not easily adaptable to others.

The IUMJ has made large inroads into building a website almost wholly XML-based. Accordingly, authors are encouraged to use LaTeX in a manner compatible with XML. Here is a list of do's and dont's.

Table 1. DO's and DONT's when using LaTeX

 Structural Markup — DO... Presentation Markup — DO NOT... Invoke LaTeX standard parts, e.g., \section{}, \subsection{}, \begin{theorem}...\end{theorem}, etcetera. Do not mark up text "by hand", e.g. {\bf Section 1. Introduction}, \textit{Proof}, etcetera. Properly nest subsections inside of sections, subsubsections inside subsections, etcetera. Do not use \section{}, \subsection{} as a means to use specific fonts and specific spacing, without regard to the structure of text flow. Properly code lists, e.g., \begin{enumerate}...\end{enumerate}, etcetera. Do not use list items as a means to underscore content by tagging paragraphs with a bullet. In the bibliography, use structural markup. In the bibliography, do not use presentation markup.

In short: Whenever possible, use structural markup — not presentation markup. Why should an author care about satisfying both TeX and XML? We expect to answer this question in another document (in preparation).

The beginning and end of a TeX manuscript

From the standpoint of structural markup, the two critical parts of a manuscript are its beginning and its end.

In the beginning ... — articleinfo

A well-formed document should begin with most if not all of these fields should be used:

  \documentclass{amsart}
\begin{document}
\title[...]{...}
\author[...]{...}
\email{...}
\dedicatory{...}
\date{...}
\thanks{...}
\translator{...}
\keywords{...}
\subjclass{...}
\begin{abstract}...\end{abstract}
\maketitle

In the end ... — the bibliography

For greater detail please see our document titled How to prepare the bibliography.

Here, then, we shall replicate two examples from the amsrefs User's Guide in order to emphasize the degree of granularity that structural markup lends itself to.

  \bib{KostrikinS1965}{article}{
author={Kostrikin, A. I.},
author={\v{S}afarevi\v{c}, I. R.},
title={Cartan pseudogroups and Lie algebras},
volume={168},
date={1965},
pages={740–742},
translation={
journal={Soviet Math. Dokl.},
volume={6},
date={1965},
pages={715–718}
},
review={\MR{0199235}}
}

  \bib{Sokal96}{article}{
title={Trangressing the boundaries},
subtitle={Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum
gravity},
author={Sokal, Alan},
journal={Social Text},
volume={46/47},
date={1996},
pages={217–252},