I recently received this in a e-mail from my professor
Good LaTeX style would preclude creating any of your own commands, counters, etc. (Most journals would reject submissions with user-defined commands.)
I have two questions:
- Is this in fact true (both parts)?
- Given that I am required to conform to a specific format and there is a lot of repetition (for example, I often have to use
\qquad\textnormal
) is there a way to define a command, and then when I run it produce a file that expands all of those macros?
Note: My understanding is that the standard way of doing this is to have the journal (or professor in this case) create a package that includes all of the things that are required to conform to the style that they want, but he does not seem to want to do that.
Best Answer
Sorry, no, that is not true. Most journals do accept reasonable shortcuts:
However, the will likely not accept stupid definitions, such as:
Nevertheless, please:
\NN
and\Naturals
doing the same stuff).\newcommand
instead of just\def
.\newcommand
, like I did above. Especially if you do any dirty stuff. However:(Speaking as a typesetting editor of a journal, and as an author of numerous publications where I use definitions like the good ones above.)