LaTeX is an excellent tool for formatting your manuscripts. During the peer review process, most journals accept PDF files. But when it comes submitting your camera ready version, the Editorial Manager (EM), used by both Springer and Elsevier, insists on receiving a source file. The process has some problems and I would like to share some of the lessons I learned. First of all you need to know that EM will compile the LaTeX files for you. You do not need to upload your PDF or DVI files.
- EM is not able to digest figures in the PDF format. Convert all your figures to EPS. This can be achieved with Adobe Acrobat or Preview (MAC).
- EM is not able to deal with directories. All your files must be in one directory, including all figures.
- You can ZIP your complete LaTeX directory and upload it. EM decompresses all the files for you. Make sure that you do not include a PDF or DVI version of your manuscript, otherwise EM will include it as well. You will end up with multiple versions of your text in the final PDF.
- If EM encounters any problems during the compilation of your LaTeX files, it will write the log into the resulting PDF. You can find out what went wrong by looking at it.
- If an error occurred, EM has trouble with processing .tex files again which have the same name as in the previous attempt. Rename your .tex file (e.g. by adding a serial number) and upload it again. EM will then compile this new file instead of the old one.
For anyone trying to upload a file using biblatex (as opposed to bibtex), you should add “casechanger=latex2e” to biblatex’s options:
\usepackage[casechanger=latex2e,…]{biblatex}
This is because EM’s TexLive 2022 is broken and cannot load the L3 extension required by biblatex by default.
Also, remember to upload the .bbl file that you generated locally (or on Overleaf). The bbl file should be generated with the same version used by EM (TexLive 2022). The bbl filename might have to match the main manuscript’s tex file name (and not “output.bbl”).
(While we’re at it, EM do not have microtype installed, so you might need to remove it from your tex file)
Thanks Oded, extremely helpful advice that finally solved my issues!
hi everybody,
I have faced this issue during the compilation by the EM. It takes up all the files except the x.bib file. References (in bib file) is not taken at all. :(
Any specific reason for this?
I have used both WinEdt and Overleaf where it compiles properly. There are no errors.
Can somebody help me out.
I successfully generated a PDF by uploading it to Elsevier’s EM of Flow Measurement and Instrumentation using the following method.
However, at the time of the first submission, I uploaded the PDF and its tex file as a manuscript and received a request for corrections from editor, so this is my second submission as Revised.
– Upload all files individually instead of using zip files
– Convert all figures to .eps (not sure if it is absolutely necessary)
– Specify all .eps as figure
– Specify the main .tex file as Revised Manuscript (Clean version)
– .bib file set as Revised Manuscript (Clean version)
– Specify other Latex necessary files (.sty, .cls, .) as Latex source file