[capnrefsmmat]

Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited. And there are other typesetting requirements that no consumer tool makes particularly easy; for instance, due to funding requirements, many journals deposit biomedical papers with PubMed Central, which wants them in JATS XML. So publishers have to prepare a structured XML version of papers.

Accessibility in PDFs is also very difficult. I'm not sure any publishers are yet meeting PDF/UA-2 requirements for tagged PDFs, which include things like embedding MathML representations of all mathematics so screenreaders can parse the math. LaTeX only supports this experimentally, and few other tools support it at all.

[adgjlsfhk1]

I bet if you offer to waive a $1500 fee for authors who submit a latex version, a lot of grad students will learn it pretty fast.

[DonaldPShimoda]

At least in my experience, grad students don't pay submission fees. It usually comes out of an institutional finances account, typically assigned to the student's advisor (who is generally the corresponding author on the submission). (Not that the waiver isn't a good idea — I just don't think the grad students are the ones who would feel relieved by that arrangement.)

Also, I'm pretty sure my SIG requires LaTeX submissions anyway... I feel like I remember reading that at some point when I submitted once, but I'm not confident in that recollection.

[D-Machine]

> Outside of disciplines that use LaTeX, the ability of authors to do typesetting is pretty limited.

Since this is obviously true, and yet since most journals (with some exceptions) demand you follow tedious formatting requirements or highly restrictive templates, this suggests, in fact, that journals are outsourcing the vast majority of their typesetting and formatting to submitters, and doing only the bare minimum themselves.

[capnrefsmmat]

Most of the tedious formatting requirements do not match what the final typeset article looks like. The requirements are instead theoretically to benefit peer reviewers, e.g., by having double-spaced lines so they can write their comments on the paper copy that was mailed to them back when the submission guidelines were written in the 1950s.

The smarter journals have started accepting submissions in any format on the first round, and then only require enough formatting for the typesetters to do their job.

[DonaldPShimoda]

...really? (Incredulous, not doubtful.)

For my area, everybody uses LaTeX styles that more or less produce PDFs identical to the final versions published in proceedings. Or, at least, it's always looked close enough to me that I haven't noticed any significant differences, other than some additional information in the margins.