NEWS 2006-11-02: We have upgraded our TeX system to teTeX3 and revised the macro package tree for new submissions. See teTeX3 transition help for possible problems that may result from this upgrade.
Look through these common mistakes if your TeX/LaTeX submission failed:
PS BAD
warningsWhen including style/class/macro files, you must use relative filenames instead of absolute filenames. For example,
article.styis correct, while:
/users/staff/fred/article.styis not.
Absolute filenames make it impossible for anyone to use the source without modifying it. Unless your TeX system happens to have the same directory structure as ours, then our automated processing will fail.
If you use a computer with case-insensitive filenames (e.g., Windows), be sure that the case of any filenames referred to in your TeX file matches exactly the files that are uploaded. For example, the command:
\includegraphics{figure1.eps}will not work if the file is uploaded as
FIGURE1.EPS
because filenames are case-sensitive on our system.
Some authors write their own style/macro files (or modify standard ones), but forget to include them with the source. Be sure to include with the source any style/macro files that we don't have.
NB: non-standard style/macro files provided along with the source must NOT be attached to a paper. Instead, submit them as separate files, or use tar to combine them with the source files before submitting.
All too often, an author will make last minute changes to the source, but won't test it to see if the results will TeX correctly. You can save yourself a lot of trouble by testing that everything works properly before submitting your paper.
Our source to postscript conversion system (called "AutoTeX") is fully automated. There is no genie present to answer questions such as:
Would you like (P)ortrait or (L)andscape ? - answer P/L
If your source needs to ask these types of question, please create a file
called filename.inp
(where filename
matches the file it is to act on) that contains suitable responses.
Your .inp
file can be first tested on your local machine by
running the following command:
$ cat filename.inp | tex filename.tex
Do not submit several files all concatenated into one file -- such files cannot be separated automatically. Instead, please create a .tar.gz or .zip file.
Style files change with time, and you (or we) might be using old versions of style files. We try to keep up to date, so if problems arise due to style files, please check that the version you are using is current.
Some well-known style files, e.g., epsf.sty
and epsfig.sty
, have been altered
by TeX programmers, then uploaded to web sites under the same filename.
This is very bad practice and anti-social behavior, since we end up with
multiple versions of standard styles.
arXiv will make every effort to support the most recent and
official versions of standard style files.
The graphics
and graphicx
packages have been standard since the release of LaTeX 2e and are the recommended graphics inclusion macros. These packages provide the most portable and reliable method of including graphics.
Style files that are incompatible with dvips
, e.g.,
epsbox.sty
, can cause problems. If the DVI requires exotic versions
of dvips
(e.g., jdvi2kps
) to produce postscript, then
our automated system will fail.
Please make every effort to avoid using non-standard styles and
dvi2ps
utilities. Few people will be able to process papers in these
non-standard formats.
All papers should be formatted so they work with TeX or LaTeX (as appropriate). If you use other formats (as opposed to style files or macros), e.g., amstex, amslatex, or aatex, then please add the appropriate line to the top of the source, e.g.:
%&amslplainfor AMS-LaTeX (based on amslatex version 1.1),
\input amstexor
%&amstex
for AMS-TeX, and
\input cp-aa.texor
%&cp-aa
for Springer-Verlag's Plain TeX Astronomy & Astrophysics macros, cp-aa (also known as aatex).
Anything that relies on something other than TeX or LaTeX will fail.
Authors should keep in mind that if they use unusual fonts, many potential readers of their work won't have them installed.
Because it would require significant admin time to install and maintain non-standard fonts, we do not generally support such fonts.
In LaTeX, any citations inside a figure \caption should be protected using the \protect command; e.g., \caption{Electron spectral function from \protect\cite{spectral}}. This delays the expansion of the citation until the second latex pass, i.e., when the reference has been defined.
If you need to include files in the source that should not be processed by the automated system, you may do either of the following:
%auto-ignore
near the top of the file. This directive can be anywhere in the first 10 lines of the file, and anywhere on the line. It should appear before any TeX or LaTeX commands, since otherwise they would be recognized first. For example:
%auto-ignore This is a README file for paper hep-ex/9901003 More data for our experiment is available at http://www.some.where/else
00README.XXX
with your submission that
includes the line:
filename ignorefor each file that should be ignored.
If you use epsf to include PostScript figures you must make sure that the %%BoundingBox definitions are near the start of the PostScript figure files. In order to reduce processing time, our TeX system does not scan the whole of each included file.
If you have a file with the following structure:
%!PS-Adobe-3.0 ... ... %%BoundingBox: (atend) ... [ bulk of PS file in here ] ... %%BoundingBox: 0 10 234 456 ... %%EOFthen simply move the %%BoundingBox line to the top:
%!PS-Adobe-3.0 ... ... %%BoundingBox: 0 10 234 456 ... [ bulk of PS file in here ] ... %%EOF
By default, our TeX system uses HyperTeX to add hyperlinks between references, sections and equations within your paper. These show up in the PDF (and in the PostScript with some viewers).
HyperTeX conflicts with a few style and class files. If you think this is a problem, you can disable HyperTeX for your submission by including a file 00README.XXX. It should contain the line:
nohypertex
Note that HyperTeX changes the way citations appear in some styles -- ranges will be represented as [11, 12, 13] instead of [11-13]. This is necessary for HyperTeX to be able to make individual links to each citation. Unless you feel very strongly about this we recommend leaving HyperTeX on.
PS BAD
warningsBy default, our TeX system tells dvips to strip comment lines from included PostScript figures. This is usually the correct thing to do because it prevents DSC (Document Structuring Comments) lines from being included from figures. If included, these would likely break the DSC structure of the final PostScript (the DSC structure is what allows viewers to display an index of page numbers).
Lines starting with '%
' in the included PostScript files are
identified as comments,
but sometimes PostScript figures include blocks of data with lines starting
with '%
' that are not comments. Removal of these lines may break the final
PostScript. You can turn off the removal of comments from included figures
for your submission by including a file 00README.XXX. It should
contain an instruction specific to the filename of the dvi file:
filename.dvi keepcomments
You can test the effect of this yourself by comparing the output of
$ dvips -R -K1 yourfile.dvi -o DSCstripped.ps $ dvips -R -K0 yourfile.dvi -o DSCkept.ps
Note that this whole issue arises because Adobe decided to use the
ignored "Comments" from the PostScript standard to provide additional
structure to regular PostScript files, which leads to complications
for programs that rely on proper DSC structure when two or more such
files are included in each other.
In our system, only the top level directory is granted write permission during processing. Attempts to write files to subdirectories will fail.
All files included via \include instead of \input must be in the top level directory. This is because the \include command attempts to write a separate .aux file in the same directory as the included file. For example:
\input{file} %OK, does not create separate .aux file \input{subdir/file} %OK, does not create separate .aux file \include{file} %OK because file.aux can be written \include{subdir/file} %WILL FAIL fail because sub/file.aux cannot be written
Our TeX system complains about double subscripts (and superscripts) because a_x_y could be read as a_{x_y} or {a_x}_y or a_x{}_y or even a_{xy}. These are not the same since the character size and position is affected.
Some older TeX systems would automatically substitute a_x{}_y without the need for user intervention, but current TeX systems (including ours) will not do this. As a result, the appropriate interpretation must be explicitly specified.
If you are curious about the differences, see these examples.
In some papers with "elaborate" section structure, hyperref can generate PostScript that contains bad pdfmarks which break PDF conversion. This problem affects mostly longer papers, reviews, theses, etc., i.e. those papers where a linked table of contents (TOC) and document outline would be most useful!
The reason is that the section counter (used for the names of destination links) is reset by authors and certain macros to control the numbering of appendix sections. The result is failure of ps2pdf conversion due to ambiguous pdfmarks or conflicting subsection count in the pdfmarks.
The simple cure is to disable HyperTex but a better work-around is to simply switch off bookmarks (i.e. document outline) while leaving normal document linking on. You can do this by adding the following line to the preamble:
\usepackage[dvips,bookmarks=false]{hyperref}
A common mistake made by authors as well as many macro packages is incorrect testing for \pdfoutput to decide whether pdflatex is run in dvi mode or pdf mode, or whether the processing is done in regular latex mode. The underlying engines used to be different and a simple test for \ifx\pdfoutput\undefined was sufficient to distinguish between all options. This is no longer the case, because the underlying engine is the same for all 3 cases and therefore the value of the \pdfoutput parameter has to be tested, too.
That is, a common (but incorrect) testing sequence might look like: "\ifx\pdfoutput\undefined .... \else ..... \fi". Symptoms of this mistake might be:
The most reliable way to accomplish conditional branching in the TeX source where necessary is instead via the ifpdf package:
\usepackage{ifpdf} \ifpdf do something pdflatex specific here \else do something for regular latex or pdflatex in dvi mode \fi
Note that the graphics package and the hyperref package are smart enough to figure this out on their own. You do not need to specify any driver for these packages.
For more information, see:
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=ifpdfYou can download the ifpdf macro from:
ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/oberdiek/ifpdf.pdf