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.)
We recommend that authors who wish to submit a manuscript to the IUMJ use these packages from the American Mathematical Society.
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).
From the standpoint of structural markup, the two critical parts of a manuscript are its beginning and its end.
A well-formed document should begin with most if not all of these fields should be used:
\documentclass{amsart}
\begin{document}
\title[...]{...}
\author[...]{...}
\address{...}
\curraddr{...}
\email{...}
\urladdr{...}
\dedicatory{...}
\date{...}
\thanks{...}
\translator{...}
\keywords{...}
\subjclass{...}
\begin{abstract}...\end{abstract}
\maketitle
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},
journal={Dokl. Akad. Nauk SSSR},
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},
publisher={Picador USA},
reprint={
title={Fashionable Nonsense},
subtitle={Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science},
author={Sokal, Alan},
author={Bricmont, Jean},
address={New York},
date={1998}
}
}