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Create a publication quality document in Mathematica?

mdkimzey Kimzey
Posted 8 years ago

I have been using Mathematica since version 6 and am now on version 11. Typically if I want to write a publication quality document (for example, I am writing an article on some home experiments on the visualization of sound in a room and would like to submit it using a IEEE template), I have to re-write the article in Microsoft Word or similar package to meet the requirements for two columns, page headers, page footers, etc.

Is there a useful reference for creating a publication quality notebook in Mathematica? I have had little luck with packages such as AuthorTools. Are there any third party applications that can covert a notebook to a Word Document?

Crosslink to Mathematica StackExchange thread
POSTED BY: mdkimzey Kimzey
5 Replies
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Literate Mathematical notebooks with Sectional organization and textual discussion exchanged between Mathematica users are the best technical medium of communication there is - by several orders of magnitude - easily. This is because of their active and dynamic capabilities. They also have a higher integrity because misprints or errors that don't compute are less likely to get into a notebook.

Notebooks can be exchanged over the web. There is no need for the drudgework of converting a superior document to a much inferior document just to appease antiquated practices and technology.

CDF documents are not that wonderful either. The reader and the writer should be on an equal footing.

Some day it will come about!
POSTED BY: David J M Park Jr

There is this from 1998 which may be helpful. And Wolfram's books were apparently done using customised style sheets, so it can be done.

But if you want a live document, why change from the NB (CDF) format? What's your end goal in this?
POSTED BY: David Annetts

Hi David - the main reason for changing from NB (CDF) format is a requirement of the publisher. I cannot send them a NB or CDF. They request LaTex or MS Word. It would be great if I could create and maintain the paper in Mathematica and export to a two column IEEE format with appropriate headers, page numbers and footers.

Typically, I use Mathematica to produce the underlying work and then re-write in MS Word. It would be nice to be able to maintain one document. I have tried this on a number of occasions, but to be perfectly honest, the level of effort required to do significantly higher (especially for simple formatting of tables and paragraphs) than MS Word. Publishers may then make minor edits without writing Mathematica code.
POSTED BY: mdkimzey Kimzey

Just a word from an Executive Editor for a journal published by Elsevier (Annals of Nuclear Energy). My definite goal is to have Elsevier, or at least my journal, to accept submissions written as notebooks, but the inertia against such changes at a large company of that size is practically infinite. I have already started a discussion on that but there is very little, if any, progress so far, except that the people higher up in the management know about the existence of such a request.
POSTED BY: Imre Pazsit

Possible: probably. Style-sheets are quite powerful but tricky to edit. I would not recommend it. Learn LaTeX (or, god forbid, use Word) and include graphics (plots and images et cetera) that you created in Mathematica. I don't think any journal will accept an NB file actually. Conversion to PDF can be done, but not editable, which is sometimes required. Moreover, page-ends are not always chosen in a nice way.
POSTED BY: Sander Huisman
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