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.