robert-winkler/scientific-articles-markdown

Formating Academic Journal Templates

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pylang commented

Your paper is well researched. Regarding markdown to latex conversions, do you have suggestions on how to adapt "templates" supplied by academic journals to your workflow?

Observation

For example, journals often supply a bundle of files that work together to serve as a "template" for an author to fill in. Such files include the .tex template file and corresponding dependencies, e.g. .cls, .bib, .sty, .bst. Here are examples of "latex template bundles supplied by journals with instructions:

Journals advise the author to amend either the .tex or related class file (.cls) and render the document using some latex engine, e.g. pdflatex. To summarize, the recommended workflow from journals may follow the following progression:

([.cls, .bib, .sty] -> .tex) -> pdf engine -> pdf output

A .tex template is rendered into a pdf.

By contrast, the pandoc-markdown workflow may proceed as follows:

.md -> pandoc + .latex -> .tex/[pdf]

A .latex template is used with pandoc to convert a markdown file to .tex or pdf.

Note: journals and pandoc use the term "template", but they have separate meanings with regards to .tex and .latex files respectively (see above).

Issue

A journal's recommended bundle of template files is incompatible with pandoc-markdown workflows, since pandoc requires a .latex template, and .latex templates are not readily supplied by journals. Therefore, an author is left with finding or making their own .latex template. However, building a custom pandoc .latex template that complies with a journal's .tex template is not straight-forward.

Question

If an author writes a paper in markdown and wants to use pandoc to submit that paper to a journal, e.g. using the Elsevier .tex bundle, what is your recommendation for formatting the output to the journal's specifications?