Subject: categories: TAC: Author information

From: TAC <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2000 15:48:19 -0400 (AST)

For reference, the Information for Authors page of Theory and Applications
of categories follows. It has been updated with assistance from Michael
Barr. The TAC style (tac.sty) and class (tac.cls) files have also been
updated, so please replace any copies you may have.

AUTHOR INFORMATION 

Theory and Applications of Categories (TAC) is an all-electronic journal
which uses the TeX typesetting system to define its contents and the
Internet to disseminate them. Authors are invited to submit articles to
any member of the Editorial Board. While any standard flavour of TeX (i.e.
plain, LaTeX, AMS-(La)Tex) may be submitted, the most important request to
an author of a TAC paper is to use one or another version of LaTeX. This
encourages the logical formatting that is described below. Before
submitting an article please read about the Format for submission .

All papers are refereed and acceptance of an article by an Editor
indicates that the high standards of the journal have been met. Articles
may be submitted to only one member of the Board.

The final accepted version of a paper is the form that will be in the
archive; the author will not be able to make any changes, except: errata
and additions can be attached to the end and, where appropriate,
footnote(s) may be added to the main text calling attention to these
addendums; references which mention pre-publication versions may be
updated to final bibliographic form.

Accepted papers will be archived electronically in .dvi and Postscript
format by the journal. In addition, there are several complete mirrors of
the journal's contents on the Internet. A printed paper copy of each
article in the journal is archived in the Mount Allison University
Library.

Authors retain ownership of copyright to their work, subject to
appropriate use of the work by the journal. For details consult the
Copyright Agreement, to which authors must agree before an accepted paper
is published.

FORMAT FOR SUBMISSION: 

SOURCE FILES

TeX source files of articles may be submitted by email to any member of
the Editorial Board. Editors may also provide facilities for receiving
articles by file transfer. Editors will not correct errors in TeX source.
It is the author's responsibility to provide a compilable source file.

The source file for an article must begin with a comment which includes
the following information: the flavour of TeX used, the number of pages,
any diagram macro package used, any non-standard fonts, the implementation
of TeX used in preparation of the article. An example might be

% LaTeX 2.09 document, 12 pp, XY-pic ver 3.1, emTeX version 3.1

An article is normally submitted as a single source file. All macros must
be included with the source file and are the responsibility of the author.
Macros should be placed at the beginning of the file. It is also helpful
if any macro that is not actually used is deleted from the source file.

The only exception to inclusion of macros is diagram macro packages. The
currently acceptable diagram macro packages are those authored by Barr,
Borceux, Rose (XY-Pic) and Taylor. The author is responsible to ensure
that the current version of a macro package has been used.

Articles must include an Abstract, in English of not more than 200 words.
AMS 2000 Subject Classification must also be also be included.

SOURCE FILE STYLE

As indicated above LaTeX is the preferred format. Using LaTeX will
facilitate consideration of an article, but papers in other standard TeX
flavors will be considered.

A style file is available from the journal. Using the style file during
preparation of articles will greatly reduce the acceptance to publication
delay.

Whether or not the journal's style is used, the most important advice for
an author of TAC (or any electronic journal or even any journal that
accepts TeXscripts) is to use logical, rather than physical formatting.
That is, instead of beginning a section by saying

\medskip

\noindent{\bf 4.3 The main theorem.}

just say 

\section{The main theorem}\label{mainth}

(The \label will be explained below.) Instead of saying 

\smallskip
 \noindent{\sc Theorem A}{\it ...}

say 

\begin{theorem}\label{thmA} ... \end{theorem}

(shorter forms as will be explained later). 

You should probably NEVER put explicit skips and kerns into your paper.
Suppose, for example, you want to go on to a new topic and want to leave a
little space. The preferable way is to say

\subsubsection*{}

which will have exactly that effect. But in fact, it is probably always
appropriate to start a new subsection in such a case. Except in very long
papers, we discourage the use of three indexing levels. The point is to
use symbolic formatting and let the journals put in their own style.

All versions of LaTeX provide definitions for \section, \subsection, and
\subsubsection. It even goes further, but these should be enough for
nearly all papers. They do not provide definitions for \begin{theorem} and
the like. But the TAC style files provide a \newtheorem macro that is used
as follows. Place at the beginning of your paper, the following:

\newtheorem{theorem}{Theorem}
\newtheorem{proposition}{Proposition}
 ... (whatever is needed)

The first parameter is what you will call it in your TeXscript and the
second what it will be called in your paper. So you can just as well say

\newtheorem{thm}{Theorem}
...

and then you can enclose your theorems in \begin{thm}...\end{thm} or even
\thm...\endthm. Beware that you lose certain error checking with the
latter form.

AVOIDABLE ERRORS

There are two mistakes made by many users of TeX that appear in print over
and over and are easy to avoid. 

The first is to have multicharacter identifiers slanted (like math
symbols), rather than in upright type. This refers to names like sin,
cos,... but also Hom, Tor, Id, ker, Im, .... The TAC style files provide
macros that can automate this. If you put in your file

\mathrmdef{Hom}

this will create a macro \Hom that will put upright Hom into your text. If
you use that instead of just Hom, the results will look much better. Using
just Hom in math mode will result in an italic font and ugly spacing that
is more appropriate to a ternary product. TAC also supplies \mathbfdef
(for bold), and \mathopdef (for upright characters that have a bit of
extra space to the right, so that, say, \sin x will produce the sin, a
small space and then an italic x, just as in the trig books).

The second error is to use <...> for angle brackets. You have no idea how
bad this will look. The < and > produce the wrong shape for angle
brackets, but mainly they produce the wrong spacing and the results can be
ludicrous, especially if an = follows > or precedes <. The official way to
do this is to say \langle and \rangle. Many papers in TAC use these angle
brackets extensively and make little or no use of the inequality signs. If
this is your case, we recommend the following. At the top of your paper,
put:

\mathcode`\<="4268 %left delimiter
\mathcode`\>="5269 %right delimiter
\mathchardef\gt="313E %relation
\mathchardef\lt="313C %relation

The effect of the first two lines is to make < and > into \langle and
\rangle, respectively, so that you can use them freely. The third and
fourth lines allow you to use \lt and \gt for the inequality signs. This
is not done in the TAC styles because an author has the right to use < and
> for the inequalites if desired.

Fonts 

Authors should note that the base font size is 12 point. Avoid use of
elements which depend on another base font size. This is another reason to
avoid absolute moves such as `\vskip 10 pt'. Remember that the journal's
pagination will differ from yours. As a general rule less, but more
logical, formatting is better.

Authors are STRONGLY encouraged to use only fonts from the standard TeX
distribution (cmr etc.), AMS symbol fonts (msym...) or the XY-pic fonts.
They should be aware that use of non-standard fonts can interfere with
successful dissemination of their work. Fonts not mentioned above must be
provided by the author to the Editor concerned and to the journal.

Embedded graphics or Postscript are not currently accepted. 

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY STYLES

When you want to refer to Theorem A (which will not be called that in the
TAC style) of Section 4.3, refer to it as Theorem~\ref{thmA} of
Section~\ref{mainth}. The labels you use are totally arbitrary, of course,
so long as they are not reused in the same paper. Use of symbolic labels
allows you to insert or delete material without having to renumber
everything or to wind up with sections or theorems bis. The ~, by the way,
is an unbreakable space so that the theorem or section number does not get
separated from the word Theorem or Section. This is considered poor style,
although it is not terribly important. It is also an element of good style
to capitalize the words Section and Theorem when followed by an explicit
reference. However, they are not capitalized in such phrases as "next
section" and "the main theorem".

If BiBTeX is used with LaTeX, bibliographies must be BiBTeXed and .bbl
files appended to the source file. No .bib files will be accepted.

References may use the standard BiBTeX styles or the two bibliography
styles that TAC supports. We recommend the first TAC style. It is much
more useful for the reader since it puts citations like [Grothendieck,
1957] in your text (you can probably already guess the reference) and the
reference in the form

\item A. Grothendieck (1957), Quelques points d'algebre homologiques,
T\^ohoku
Math. J. \em{3}, 120-221.

You get the first style by preceding your references with 

\begin{references}

and ending the list of \items with 

\end{references}

The second style is traditional and puts [4] into your paper with the
reference in the traditional form 

\item A. Grothendieck, Quelques points d'algebre homologiques, T\^ohoku
Math. J. \em{3} (1957), 120-221.

To obtain it use 

\begin{references*}

 \item ...

\end{references*}

except you will almost surely want to use \bibitem, allowing you to put in
a symbolic label. 

A FINAL POINT

Although these instructions are specific to TAC, they should go a long way
towards making your papers usable by any journal that is serious about
using author-supplied TeX.