As a matter of academic curiosity, I've been wondering for a while how one could produce an entire volume of an academic journal (not just a single journal article) using LaTeX. It seems clear to me that a number of publishers use LaTeX to produce their journals (IEEE, American Physical Society, and Elsevier come to mind) especially since many journals provide LaTeX document classes, but it's not clear to me how they go about it. Specific questions that I have include:
- Supposing every article is submitted in LaTeX format, how are they combined to produce the volume of the journal? Is it possible to use
\input{}or\include{}on the standalone articles (and are there any existing document classes that allow one to do this), or is it necessary to edit the preambles of the individual articles? - How does one produce a table of contents for a document consisting of multiple parts, each with their own title and author(s)?
- How does one handle potential name conflicts between references in different articles (cross-references, citations, etc.)? The only way that I can think of offhand (for cross-references, at least) is to adopt a naming convention for labels, e.g.
\label{author:label}, which should prevent many (but obviously not all) name conflicts.
Best Answer
the ams generates journal issues using a combination of unix scripts and a "template" produced from a database, identifying the articles to be included, the starting/ending page numbers, and other relevant data. articles are processed individually -- there are no "mutual" cross-references, so that complication is avoided -- and combined only after the dvi/ps/pdf output is generated. more scripts generate tables of contents, indexes, etc.
every publisher, no doubt, has their own procedure; some, i know from hearsay, resolve all data into an xml archive. the ams is possibly in the minority for using the latex files as the underlying archival data, but until either latex/xml/mathml translators become more reliable, or good, preferably free, xml-authoring tools for math are available, the volume of math in ams journals makes latex the most practical archival format. we keep looking ...