Information about the Chicago Journal of TCS
Information for authors and readers
Table of Contents
Additional Resources
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How to Subscribe to CJTCS
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Issues in the Design of CJTCS
The Format of Published Articles in CJTCS
The definitive version of an article published in the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science is a LaTeX2e source file containing the text of the article, an accompanying BIBTeX source file containing the bibliography, and optional encapsulated PostScript files containing drawings included in the article. The journal's copy editors prepare the source files for each article to present the logical structure of the article as clearly as possible, so as to maximize portability of the text, and to facilitate future development of browsing interfaces and information retrieval applications. Precompiled PostScript translations are provided for readers who cannot format LaTeX , or do not wish to, but the LaTeX source is the definitive copy.
Reader-Powered Publication
Electronically published journals have used a variety of different publication formats, including bitmapped page images, PostScript page layouts, typographical formats such as LaTeX , plain ASCII , and special proprietary formats closely integrated with browsing and information-retrieval software. Each of these choices favors different qualities of publication---for example, bitmaps, PostScript , and some proprietary formats give authors and publishers maximum control over the beauty of the final display, while plain ASCII requires the minimum equipment and skill on the part of the reader, etc. The publication format of the Chicago Journal is intended to maximize readers' power to use articles in whatever ways they find most productive. The problem is that we cannot anticipate precisely what readers will do, but we should assume at least that they display articles in a wide variety of typographical formats suited to their equipment, their paper or screen size, and their eyesight, and that they apply browsing and information-retrieval software acquired from other suppliers than MIT Press. To stretch our imaginations a bit, Reading for the Blind had a workshop investigating the use of the AsTeR system to allow audio browsing of LaTeX documents.
The way to maximize the power of readers in the long run, without precise knowledge of reader behavior, is to represent the logical structure of articles in the most transparent and easily parsable way that we can manage (see my paper on electronic journals for a more detailed argument). SGML was designed precisely for this task, but it can also be done satisfactorily with a disciplined use of LaTeX . Furthermore, LaTeX supports the representation of mathematical formulae fairly well, and most of our reader and author community already has the software to typeset and display LaTeX . But, maximum power and flexibility for readers demands a certain amount of standardization in the source format of articles. Readers, and particularly readers' software packages, must be able to parse important components, such as sectional units, paragraphs, sentences, displayed subtexts such as theorems, easily and unambiguously. To provide this uniform clarity in the LaTeX source, copy editors must polish authors' manuscripts into a disciplined subset of LaTeX . Authors need not be concerned with the details of that disciplined subset, but should be aware that their efforts at clever layout may be lost in copy editing.
Instructions for Authors
Submitting an Article to CJTCS
All contributions to the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science are submitted by electronic mail in LaTeX source format. If your contribution is accepted, the copy editor will polish your LaTeX source into the portable, flexible, and robust form discussed in the previous two sections . The remainder of these instructions are intended to guide you in preparing a submission efficiently. The closer that you follow these rules, the more quickly and easily your contribution can be evaluated and published, and the less effort you will waste on clever layout that may be replaced by the copy editor. When there are good reasons to use structures other than the normal ones, you should negotiate changes with the editors. But, when conventional forms are satisfactory, you will help everyone's efficiency by following them.
What to Submit
To submit an article for consideration by the editors, choose a short mnemonic name for your contribution, and prepare the following three files:
- name .doc , a plain ASCII file containing your name, as many ways of reaching you as possible (mail address, e-mail address, telephone number, FAX number), a list of the other files that you are submitting, and any special message that you would like to provide for the editors (such as your preference for a nonstandard numbering scheme for theorems);
- name .tex , a LaTeX source file containing the text of the article, formatted with the standard article style, using any of the AMS-LaTeX style options amstex , amsbsy , amscd , amsfonts , amssymb , amstext that you need;
- name .bib , a BIBTeX source file containing bibliography for the article ( BIBTeX source includes a lot of useful markup of the components of bibliographical entries that is usually lost in *.bbl files or hand-coded bibliographies).
Please include all local macro definitions (everything not defined in TeX , plain TeX , LaTeX , the article style, the AMS-LaTeX options, or encapsulated PostScript support such as the epsf style) in the preamble to name .tex , rather than in a separate file of macro definitions. If you have written your article using other files of specialized macro definitions, you may find the UNIX command texexpand helpful in folding those definitions in to one file.
Drawings
I recommend strongly that you prepare drawings with xfig , export them in eepic format (but save the fig sources as well), and include them in the LaTeX source file with the rest of the article. This will make it much easier to revise the drawings, and keep them consistent with various article formats. The main shortcoming of xfig is that it does not format mathematical formulae and text with the same fonts and the same style as your article. But, it is reasonably easy to fix this by editing the eepic output. This final editing is easiest if you use a single xfig text entry for each piece of formatted text or formula, rather than, e.g., placing superscripts and subscripts as separate text elements in xfig . The actual text entry in xfig does not need to look exactly like the final product: it only needs to be easily recognizable when you are editing the eepic . Look at the LaTeX source of published articles for examples. If your article is accepted, I will ask for the fig sources as well, so that I can polish the figures during final production.
As a last resort, if eepic cannot support the drawings that you need to convey your ideas, you may provide encapsulated PostScript as follows:
- name f i .eps , encapsulated PostScript file with a picture for Figure i
- name t j .eps , encapsulated PostScript file with a picture for Table j
How to Submit
Submit your article by electronic mail to
chicago-journal@cs.uchicago.edu
If you are computing on a UNIX system, the best form of submission is a single shar archive containing all of the files mentioned above in one message. Use the mnemonic name of your article as the Subject line of the message. The next best form is a separate message for each file transmitted, using the file name as the Subject line.
Guidelines for Your LaTeX Source
Try to use the simplest, most direct expression of the structure of your article in the main name .tex file. For example, mark sectional units with the standard LaTeX sectional commands \section , \subsection , etc., rather than hand-coding your own headings. Do not try to achieve a beautiful layout by clever use of TeX and LaTeX tricks: most of that layout work will be lost during copy editing anyway. In particular, specific font choices (except \em for emphasis, and special uses in defining mathematical symbols), type size choices, spacing by reference to absolute units ( in , cm , pc , pt ), and page breaking will be lost in copy editing. We are collecting macros to aid you in preparing submissions in the file cjauthor.tex (it has only one item so far). As this collection of macros grows, please use it as much as possible to avoid wasted effort on solved problems. You may contribute material for cjauthor.tex , but it will be incorporated only if it contributes to the efficiency of this journal. Use indentation and blank comment lines to make your LaTeX source file more readable.
As much as possible, provide drawings in the main article source file, using the pic , epic , or eepic resources. If you have material that can only be presented in encapsulated PostScript , use the command
\epsfbox{ filename }
which is normally defined in a file named epsf.sty .
Your contribution is a late draft, and you may decide to revise it in light of the referees' comments. So, make full use of the LaTeX features that support the maintenance of a sequence of drafts. Avoid typing in absolute names and numbers for labels, cross-references and citations. Use the automatically numbered version of the sectioning commands, floats, and theorem-like environments, as well as \label , \ref , and \cite . In this way latex will produce labels, cross-references and citations automatically, and correct them after revisions. You may leave the final publication numbering scheme to the copy editors. Or, if you suggest a particular numbering scheme (for example, hierarchical within sectional units, or lemmas numbered hierarchically within the proofs that contain them) the editors will use it as long as it is internally consistent and compatible with the needs of readers for clear references into articles.
Mathematical Formulae
Mathematical formulae tend to blur the distinction between meaningful text and aesthetic layout, so you may need to exercise closer control of formatting than you do in normal English text. As much as possible, define sensible macros that stand for mathematically meaningful operations. Try to put all nitty-gritty typographical commands, such as type style choices and spacing adjustments, inside such macros. When you need to design special mathematical notation, use the standard type styles \rm , \it , \bf , \sl , \sf , \sc , \tt , \cal , or type styles supported by fonts distributed by the American Mathematical Society. Other type styles must be negotiated with the editors in advance, and they must be implemented by fonts that are available for free distribution to all readers. Use the \mathstyleclass command in cjauthor.tex to declare new classes of mathematical symbols using specific type styles.
Reviewing and Revising
Your contributed article will be assigned to a contact editor, who will use anonymous referees to help review it. After the review, the editors may decide to accept the article for publication, decline it, or ask for revisions. When revisions are required by the editors and referees, you should submit a complete revised version of your article, along with comments on how your revisions address the concerns of the editors and referees. Such revisions may be submitted in the same form as your original contribution, except that instead of the files name .* , provide name -resp1.* containing your response to the referees' comments, and mail the revised version to your contact editor. The journal also provides a way for the referees to communicate technical questions to you directly but anonymously when appropriate to speed reviewing. You may answer such queries in the normal way that you reply to network mail.
If your article is accepted for publication, it will be forwarded immediately to the copy editors, who will correct stylistic problems and edit your LaTeX source into the disciplined form that we designed to maximize readers' flexibility. Copy editing is not intended to introduce substantive changes in your article, but since the boundary between format and substance is not always simple, the copy editors will need to communicate with you to ask questions and to gain your approval of the final version. Please address all replies directly to the copy editors. If you wish to propose any revisions during copy editing, please describe the appropriate changes to the copy editors, instead of submitting fresh versions of the complete article. Copy editing requires one month. In order to maintain this schedule, you need to respond to queries from the copy editor within 3 working days.
Appendixes: approved, discouraged, and prohibited LaTeX features
Instructions for Readers
The design of the
Chicago Journal
is intended to maximize the
long-term value of articles to readers, not by offering sophisticated
user-interface software specialized to the journal, but rather by
providing the clearest and most flexible possible presentation of the
information in each article, and allowing readers the freedom to use
that information in whatever ways they find most productive. A
previous section
explains the ideas leading to the
design of the source format for journal articles.
Please Subscribe
Readers of the Chicago Journal must subscribe in order to enjoy legitimate access to published articles. MIT Press and the editors have decided not to invest effort in technical devices to prevent nonsubscribers from reading articles, because we prefer to employ our time producing the best possible product for subscribers, and because most devices for preventing illegitimate access also degrade legitimate access. We depend on the honesty of readers in order to collect the subscription fees that are necessary to support the operations of the journal. As a nonsubscriber, it is reasonable to inspect the materials in the journal, in the same spirit that you would inspect a magazine at the news-stand before deciding whether to purchase it. But, as soon as you decide to employ journal articles in your work or studies, you should subscribe ($30 per year), or even better persuade your library to subscribe ($125 per year). If another category of subscription appears useful to you, please propose it. You may subscribe right now with an interactive subscription form .
How Not to Read These Instructions
If you are a subscriber, and you only want to read an individual article in a preformatted layout, and you know the directory where the article is stored, just print or view the only file with the suffix " .ps " using your favorite PostScript processor. If you are contemplating anything more sophisticated, you may need to read on.
Rights of Subscribers
As a subscriber, or member of a subscribing library, you have very liberal rights to use articles published in the Chicago Journal . You may use articles from previous years, as well as those published in the year of your subscription. In the distant future, if very old articles must be archived offline for efficiency, there may be an additional charge to cover the cost of retrieving old articles. In the foreseeable future, all published articles will be available online.
Legitimate Uses of Published Articles
Over the years and centuries, society has developed a certain amount of consensus about the reasonable use of printed texts. It is probably impossible to lay out precise rules for the use of published electronic texts, but common sense reasoning in good faith should carry us a long way. Many principles carry over from printed text to electronic text, as long as those principles are expressed in terms of the transactions that take place between authors, editors, publishers, readers, and the information in the text, rather than in terms of physical operations on the presentation of the text. For example, the act of reading a text carries over fairly well, but the act of copying , which is well-defined for printed text, is not at all clear for electronic text. The act of formatting a text into a particular visual layout carries over from print to electronics, but because it requires much less capital equipment in the electronic form, it may often be done by readers instead of publishers.
In general, as a subscriber to the Chicago Journal , you have the right to use published articles in any way whose primary intention and effect is to further your own research or studies. You must not use articles in order to mislead others about the views or competence of the author, nor as part of a commercial product unless authorized by MIT Press. For example, you may
- read articles directly from the official journal servers, or from any other server that grants you access
- copy articles to your own file space for temporary use
- form your own permanent archive of articles, which you may keep even after your subscription lapses
- display articles in the ways most convenient to you---on your computer, printed on paper, converted to spoken form, whatever
- apply agreeable typographical styles from any source to lay out and display articles (see Custom Formatting below)
- apply any information retrieval, information processing, and browsing software from any source to aid your study of articles
- convert articles to other formats from the LaTeX and PostScript forms on the official servers
- share copies of articles with other subscribers
- share copies of articles with nonsubscribing collaborators as a direct part of your collaborative study or research
How to Cite Articles
The source code for every published article contains a standard bibliographical citation to the article in BIBTeX form. If you are citing the article in another document prepared with LaTeX , please copy that standard citation unchanged, or with the least change necessary to satisfy the stylistic requirements of your publisher. When quoting passages from articles, please copy directly from the LaTeX source as much as possible. The LaTeX source publication format for the Chicago Journal has all landmarks such as section numbers written in explicitly, rather than produced dynamically by latex , so if you quote published material in another LaTeX -formatted document it is easy to maintain perfect accuracy. You may load, or copy selected definitions from, the freely distributed style file cjstruct.cls in order to process the special macros used in published articles (authors note---these macros are introduced during copy editing, so you need not be concerned about them).
When referring to specific portions of the text of a published article in the Chicago Journal , please be careful to use robust and portable landmarks. In particular, do not refer to page numbers . Page numbers are ephemeral in Chicago Journal aricles---they are reassigned dynamically for the convenience of the reader each time an article is formatted, but they have no permanence and no meaning. Instead of page numbers, refer to sectional units, definitions, theorems, lemmas, etc., by their numbers. If you need to specify finer grains, you may use short quotes, or the standardized paragraph numbers in the LaTeX source (these are often not printed, but see \parnumstrue below). If you really want to refer to sentences, they are marked unambiguously in the LaTeX source by the macros \@ (for sentences ending in punctuation) or \sentence (when there is no terminating punctuation). Sentence numbers are not written into the source, but you may count from the beginnings of paragraphs. There are more cases than you might think in which one sentence contains another, so at this level of reference short quotes often provide the clearest pointers.
If you are confused about how to cite, quote, and refer to articles clearly and precisely, please contact me .
How to Read Articles
Structure of the Information Servers
Articles in the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science are published one at a time, to minimize delays. They are collected into volumes, labelled by the calendar year of publication. Within each volume, articles are numbered sequentially. The official information servers carrying the Chicago Journal have a directory for each volume, containing a subdirectory for each article. Within the subdirectory for an article, it is convenient to use a systematic assignment of file names for the several files associated with an article. For example, consider the fictitious 12th article published in the year 1993 (the first article, in fact, was published in 1995). The required files defining the article are
- cj93-12.tex
- definitive LaTeX source for the article body
- cj93-12.bib
- BIBTeX source for the bibliography
- c9312f3.eps
- encapsulated PostScript for Figure 3
- c9312f4.eps
- encapsulated PostScript for Figure 4
- c9312f7.eps
- encapsulated PostScript for Figure 7
- c9312t1.eps
- encapsulated PostScript for Table 1
- c9312t3.eps
- encapsulated PostScript for Table 3
- cj93-12.dvi
- preformatted DVI version of the entire article
- cj93-12.ps
- preformatted PostScript version of the entire article
- cj93-12.au
- preformatted audio version of the entire article
- cjropts.tex
- parameter settings for custom formatting
Formatting and Displaying Articles
The simplest way to read articles from the Chicago Journal is to display the preformatted DVI or PostScript version supplied with each article, either on a graphics screen, using a viewer such as xdvi or ghostview , or printed on paper using any PostScript printer and driving software. If you read articles this way, please be aware that, unlike an article printed in a paper journal, the specific layout in the PostScript version has no permanence. In particular, you should not refer to typographical ephemera, such as page numbers, in written references to articles. Instead, use the permanent numbers of sectional units and other subtexts, such as theorems. If you prefer to read aurally, you may play the experimental audio version of the article through appropriate audio output software and devices. The PostScript and audio versions are not guaranteed to be archived permanently. They will be provided as long as they seem to be sufficiently valuable as conveniences to readers who cannot or do not care to produce their own layouts.
Custom Formatting
Instead of reading the preformatted PostScript or audio version of an article, you may present the article in whatever layout is most convenient for your own research or study. The LaTeX source format for the journal has been designed to make it as convenient as possible for you to customize the layout without accidentally changing the contents of the article. Essentially, you may apply any LaTeX style definitions, acquired from others or of your own invention, to produce a convenient display. This is possible without any editing of the definitive text of the article, as represented in the *.tex , *.bib , and *.eps files described above. Since TeX is a powerful and general programming language, something called a "style definition" might in principle change the text arbitrarily, substituting entirely different material. It is your responsibility as a reader not to distort the author's meaning by processing an article in a misleading way through a "style definition." In practice, this is no more subtle than your responsibility not to misattribute ideas in print.
In order to format Chicago Journal articles on your own, you need:
- an installation of LaTeX ,
- the LaTeX style file cjstruct.cls ,
- for many articles, one or more of the AMS style definitions for mathematical formulae.
To format a Chicago Journal article you need to establish all of the defining files for the article in a directory that you may write in, and run LaTeX once, then BIBTeX once, then LaTeX twice more. If you find this sequence annoying, you may try the UNIX utility latexmk .
The two vehicles for reader customization are files named cjropts.tex and cjrdefs.tex , defined by you and read in by cjstruct . cjropts.tex is read near the beginning of processing, and is the best place to accomplish simple customizations: to choose a main LaTeX style other than the default cjlook or article ; to provide style options, such as point sizes; to set style parameters, such as page length and width; to select or suppress optional features in the article, such as author information, table of figures, paragraph numbers. cjrdefs.tex is read near the end of processing, just before the options to the main LaTeX style. Your definitions in cjrdefs.tex override everything that came before.
Simple Customization with cjropts.tex
The default LaTeX layout style for an article is cjlook , if that style definition is found on your system. The secondary default is article , which is found with essentially every LaTeX installation. To select a style other than the default, put a line of the form
\rstyle={ style-name }in your cjropts.tex file. To provide options to that style, put in a line of the form
\roptions={ option-list }where option-list is a list of options separated by commas. When you run latex , the article will be formatted as if it began with the line
\documentstyle[ option-list ]{ style-name }or, if you are using LaTeX2e , with
\documentclass[ option-list ]{ style-name }Any style that uses the same command names as article should work, but styles with different commands, such as amsart , will not. Many useful options are compatible with cjstruct , but a few, such as leqno , are not.
You may also set normal TeX and LaTeX style parameters, such as \textwidth , in cjropts.tex , just as you would in your own LaTeX source file. In addition, there are some special style parameters defined by cjstruct.cls :
- \infotrue causes administrative information about the authors and the paper to be listed at the beginning of the paper (default \infofalse );
- \contentsfalse suppresses the table of contents (default \contentstrue );
- \listfigsfalse suppresses the list of figures (default \listfigstrue );
- \listtabsfalse suppresses the list of tables (default \listtabstrue );
- \listthmsfalse suppresses the list of theorems, definitions, and similar labelled subtexts (default \listthmstrue );
- \listeqnstrue causes a list of numbered equations to be formatted in the head matter (default \listeqnsfalse );
- \abstractonlytrue suppresses everything after the abstract, and also the table of contents, list of figures, etc. (default \abstractonlyfalse );
- \parnumstrue causes paragraph numbers to be formatted in the margin as landmarks for references (default \parnumsfalse );
- \renewcommand{\parnumstyle}{ your-style } redefines the style for paragraph numbers (default \tiny\it );
- \renewcommand{\parnumsep}{ your-sep } redefines the separator between paragraph numbers and the margin (default \hspace{3em} );
- \renewcommand{\secnumsep}{ your-sep } redefines the separator between section numbers and section titles (default \hspace{1em} );
- \renewcommand{\floatnumsep}{ your-sep } redefines the separator between figure/table numbers and their titles (default \hspace{1em} );
- \rbibstyle={ your-bib-style } selects a style for the bibliography (default alpha );
- \includeepsfalse prevents inclusion of encapsulated PostScript pictures, and leaves blank spaces for the figures in case you want to cut and paste (default \includeepstrue );
- \epssupport={ eps-support-file } selects a file of definitions to support inclusion of encapsulated PostScript (default epsf.sty );
- \renewcommand{\epsmagnification}{ your-mag } selects a magnification factor for scaling all encapsulated PostScript inclusions, presumably to fit a small page format (default 1.0 ).
Advanced Customization with cjrdefs.tex
In cjrdefs.tex you may over-ride any definitions in cjstruct.cls and the main LaTeX style that you chose by setting \rstyle as described above. If you are TeX pert enough to be performing advanced customization, your best source of information is the documented source for cjstruct.cls and the other style file that you have chosen. Due to the order in which LaTeX reads style definitions, the files associated with any options that you select by setting \roptions are read in after cjrdefs.tex , and those definitions will over-ride yours. To enjoy the truly last word, you may read in option files explicitly, using \input commands in either cjropts.tex or cjrdefs.tex . Or, you may create an option file of your own, say myopt.sty , and make it the last option mentioned when you define \roptions . Such a personal *.sty file has the additional advantage of access to macros with occurrences of the "@" character in their names.
Editing the LaTeX Source of an Article
As much as possible, avoid editing the LaTeX source code of an article. You should be able to achieve most any stylistic customization by appropriate entries in your own cjropts.tex and cjrdefs.tex files. The only obvious reason for editing the article source is to quote a short passage in another work---for this purpose you should use your favorite editor program to copy in the simplest and most direct way possible, and either load or copy selected definitions from cjstruct.cls to interpret the macros in the quoted portions. In particular, you should not replace the specially defined numbering commands with the corresponding LaTeX commands (e.g., you should not replace \asection with \section ) because then latex will renumber sectional units and other subtexts whose identifying numbers are intended as standardized landmarks for reference into the article. If you think that you need to edit article source in any more radical way than excerpting a quote, please contact me for an alternative solution.
Last modified: 1 January 1997