Tag: LaTeX

The dark side of submitting in LaTeX

Point 1. On the publishers portals, LaTeX looks old-fashioned. The compilation seemed romantic in the early students years, but currently it looks awful to me: LaTeX -> BibTeX -> LaTeX -> DVI -> PS -> PDF. ShareLaTeX is great, yet to submit a paper one has to return to the old-school compilation.

Point 2. Grammarly does not work with bare TeX even in ShareLaTeX. There is so much space for improvement, where publishers could significantly contribute. Do they?

Point 3. Vector figures are great. Why do publishers ask for eps? The encapsulated postscript is outdated. For instance, it does not support transparency and also gradients, to a certain extent.

Surprisingly open

Somehow I have missed the fact that a recently published paper on “Self-interaction error in DFT-based modelling of ionic liquids” is gold open-access dx.doi.org/10.1039/C5CP05922D. That is great! Thanks to the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid that paid the costs.

In this paper we investigate the influence of the self-interaction error (SIE) on dipole moments and interaction energies of ionic liquids. The reference level is MP2, yet we are already moving to the CCSD(T) level. Most importantly, the influence of the SIE of KS-DFT has been barely considered within the ionic liquid community, and the presented study addresses exactly this issue. Read the open access article and examine your-self what we have found dx.doi.org/10.1039/C5CP05922D.

P.S. The paper was prepared in ShareLaTeX mainly by me (Vladislav Ivaništšev) and Isabel Lage-Estebanez. In-time we will share some tips and tricks about organizing the real-time editing. Anton Ruzanov performed most of the analysis, visualization and plotting. Some know-how should be also shared soon.

Some useful notes about LaTeX

First, when advanced spell checking is needed, the LaTeX could be converted to plain-text using: detex filename > filename.txt (note the omission of .tex extension).
Most LaTeX distributions come with detex program which simply strips LaTeX commands.

Second, when working with vector figures it might be a good idea to convert all texts to paths. Remember that eps-format does not support transparency.

Third, in order to count words in the final pdf-file use pdftotext filename.pdf - | tr -d '.' | wc -w. This will return the number of words in our file.

Finally, to generate a pdf-file that is acceptable by manuscriptcentral add \pdfminorversion 4 to your LaTeX-source.
Otherwise, if you use pdflatex to produce your pdf-file, manuscriptcentral will give a notice “failed to convert to the appropriate pdf”. Read this blog-post for details.