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Do pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX produce documents with substantial differences, to the point that publishers such as Springer, Elsevier, etc. would reject it for publication, based on the technical properties of the compiled document?

McGafter
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vmk
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    Can you restate your question in understable language, please? –  Jun 03 '15 at 10:57
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    I think that you are asking if you can use xelatex for journal submissions. In general no unless the submission guidelines say yes. There usually is not any point in customising the fonts for documents used for journal submission, the journal will use its own fonts anyway. – David Carlisle Jun 03 '15 at 11:08
  • Thank you, David. Yes, I do prepare instructions about Latex for our university for journal submissions and my question is, can the translator be XeLaTeX. If XeLaTeX - no for submission, than for what many people talk about it and what for to use it? – vmk Jun 03 '15 at 12:24
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    It might surprise you to know that TeX is used outside academia, too. – Sean Allred Jun 03 '15 at 13:51

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Each journal (the serious ones that offers the possibility to work with TeX format) has a LaTeX template that you have to conform with. This serves both ways; the author gets a rough idea about the final product and the publisher receives a semi-finished product.

Then, the journal (again the serious ones) does not just take your .tex file and publish. Most often they convert it to some other internal template and they control every detail there. Hence your TeX file becomes obsolete after acceptance. IEEE sends the PDF for proofreading, Elsevier uses an internal format for the HTML and PDF versioning so on. You as an author get detached from the publication process in terms of TeX after acceptance.

You might have arxiv in mind that receives the TeX file and compiles it with a not-so-old TeX system but that is rather an exception and technically nothing is refereed or published only stored.

Thus, there is no point submitting a Xe(La)TeX document to a publisher unless they explicitly mention that they can handle the fonts and other engine-specific details.

The second part of your question about its existence is covered here and links therein

I am new to TeX. Should I use LaTeX, XeLaTeX, ...?

Community
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percusse
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  • I like to think that I submit papers to serious journals. I think I've only experienced once that someone had a LaTeX template. It might be the case in your field that "serious" journals all have LaTeX templates, but it's not true for all fields. – Sverre Jun 03 '15 at 13:05
  • @Sverre Reworded. That was not implied since we are dealing with TeX-based submissions. – percusse Jun 03 '15 at 13:07
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The way our publications are done is to prepare the document in XeLaTeX and then compile it with TeXShop etc. into a PDF that looks like we want it. The printing company then takes that PDF file and prints from that. We've not had any problems raised with where the PDF comes from, so far.

Things which might be queried would rather be such as the quality of included images and how close you come to the printable margins in that final PDF.

Working through an actual publishing company might be slightly different, but I don't see why they can't work from the PDF itself. Any major corrections to the document would probably be best to have you, the author, do it over again anyway.

McGafter
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  • How do they type all the math and symbols? Manually? Or they literally print it right away? – percusse Jun 03 '15 at 13:13
  • All the journals I've submitted to (theoretical computer science and some mathematics journals) have worked in the way that @percusse describes. Initial submission is a PDF which can usually be in any reasonable format; the accepted version must be typeset with a particular style file, you give them the LaTeX source and they do whatever they do with it. In particular, final typesetting is their job and there should be no "major corrections" to the document after it's been accepted. – David Richerby Jun 03 '15 at 14:30
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    @DavidRicherby Just to clarify, my approach is the case where I find myself actually being the publisher and working directly with the printing company. – McGafter Jun 04 '15 at 07:47
  • @percusse In my case there are no math only a lot of various languages (English/Spanish/German/Hebrew etc.), which is why I'm using XeLaTeX as I've found it to handle all these the best in my opinion. – McGafter Jun 04 '15 at 07:50
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As I now understand, 1) if we talk about mainstream submissions and prepare instruction to use for different students and scientists of my university (to send their articles for publishing) - we must base it on pdflatex (with words: download the latex class, styles and template from journal site you want submission at ); 2) XeTeX is enough good (very) and if we prepare any publucation for our own organization we will use if wish XeLaTeX

vmk
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