Electronic Manuscript Preparation
| AASTeX v5.0: Basic Instructions for Electronic Manuscript Preparation |
Follow the instructions below when preparing electronic submissions in AASTeX 5.0. See the sample documents for examples of manuscripts prepared using AASTeX v5.0.
Please refer to the instructions to authors for the The Astrophysical Journal, The Astronomical Journal, and Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for more specific information regarding individual journal style and instructions for submission.
In LaTeX manuscripts, the preamble is that portion of the file before the \begin{document} command. The first piece of markup in the manuscript is the \documentclass command. This command declares the overall style of the document.
This specifies the document class as AASTeX v5.0. If no style is explicitly called, the default style, manuscript, is called. The paper copy produced by this style file will be double-spaced. Any tables included in the main body of the manuscript will also be double-spaced. This is the style you should use when preparing an electronic submission. (Other styles are available; see the AASTeX 5.0 Author Guide for more information.)
The AASTeX package supports author-defined commands using \newcommand. These definitions should be placed in the document preamble only.
If you are submitting a paper to the ApJ, AJ, or PASP, please use \newcommand and not \def. This will help ensure that your macros will translate properly into SGML. See the AASTeX 5.0 Author Guide for more information on writing translatable macros.
If you wish to include a short remark on the title page, such as the name and date of the journal to which an article has been scheduled, you may do so with the following command:
Authors are invited to supply running head information. There are generally two different kinds of data in running heads; the left head contains an author list (last names, truncated as "et al." if there are more than three authors), while the right head is an abbreviated form of the paper title. This running head information will not appear on the printed page.
Note that these commands replace the old AASTeX v4.0 \lefthead and \righthead commands, which are deprecated in AASTeX v5.0.
Editors and publishers impose varying requirements on the brevity of these data. A good rule of thumb is to limit the list of authors to three, otherwise use "et al.", and limit the short form of the title to 44 characters. The editors may choose to modify author-supplied running heads.
Prepare title page information using the \title, \author, \affil, and \email commands:
All information should be keyed in mixed case. Line breaks specified with the \\ command are permitted in the title, although long titles will be broken automatically, so the \\ markup is not required. When there is more than one author command, the last one should be preceded by an \and command.
When there is a lengthy author list, all authors' names may be specified in a single \author command, with affiliations specified using the \altaffilmark mechanism described below. In such a case, no \affil commands would be used, and in print the affiliations would all be listed in a footnote block at the bottom of the title page.
Authors often have affiliations in addition to their principle employer, and these are specified with the \altaffilmark and \altaffiltext commands. (These behave like the \footnotemark and \footnotetext commands in LaTeX, except there are no optional arguments in the AASTeX commands.) Append \altaffilmark to the authors' names in the \author list to generate superscript identification numbers. Use \altaffiltext to generate the individual alternate affiliations.
Enclose the abstract of the paper in the abstract environment.
Keywords, subject headings, etc., are accommodated as a single piece of text.
The keywords should follow immediately after the \end{abstract} command.
The \keywords command supplies the proper leading text ("Keywords:", "Subject headings:", etc.), according to journal style. If you supply keywords they must be delimited by the punctuation required by the journal. Keywords should be specified in alphabetical order.
The manuscript style for AASTeX manuscripts supports four levels of section headings.
Section headings should be given in mixed case. Note that these commands delimit sections by marking the beginning of each section; there are no separate commands to identify the ends.
Display equations can be typeset in many ways using the standard displayed math environments of LaTeX; these three are probably of greatest use:
The displaymath environment will break out a single, unnumbered formula. The equation environment does the same thing, except the equation is autonumbered by LaTeX. Use the eqnarray environment to set several formulae in which vertical alignment is required or to display a long equation across multiple lines.
You may occasionally wish to group related equations together and identify them with letters appended to the same equation number, as opposed to having each with a separate numeral. When this is desired, such related equations should still be set in equation or eqnarray environments (whichever is appropriate), and this grouping should be placed within the mathletters environment.
See sample.tex for examples of properly-coded display math.
It is possible to override LaTeX's automatic numbering within the equation or eqnarray environments. See the AASTeX v5.0 Author Guide for details.
Use the \acknowledgments command to mark the acknowledgments section of a paper.
Authors may make notes or comments to the editors with the \notetoeditor command.
When one or more appendices are needed in a paper, the end of the main body text must be marked.
The \appendix command takes care of a number of internal housekeeping concerns, such as identifying sections with letters instead of numerals and resetting the equation counter. Note that the \appendix command takes no arguments. Sections in the appendix should be marked with \section commands just as they were in the main body of the text.
Two main options are available for building the reference list and symbolically marking citations within a manuscript: the LaTeX thebibliography environment, which in AASTeX v5.0 incorporates features of natbib, and the references environment. Authors are strongly encouraged to use thebibliography for handling references. For more detailed information on bibilographic and citation markup, see AASTeX v5.0 Author Guide.
You are encouraged to use the semantics of LaTeX's thebibliography environment, marking citations with \cite and associating references with them via \bibitem. The \cite-bibitem mechanism associates citations and references symbolically while maintaining proper citation syntax within the paper. It is your responsibility to make sure that the citation label and bibliographic data adhere to the style of the journal to which you are submitting your paper.
A reference list formatted with the thebibliography environment looks like this:
where label must adhere to journal style, e.g. "Abt (1986)". Because AASTeX uses features of the natbib package, you must put parentheses around the year in your label in order for the text citation markup to work correctly.
To cite the reference in the text, insert the key as an argument to the \cite command:
LaTeX will then insert the value of label in place of the \cite command durning processing. The classic \cite command works like natbib's \citet, producing a citation in the form "Abt (1990)". If you want a cite of the form "(Abt 1990)", use \citep.
For detailed information on the natbib commands, please refer to the package documentation. See AASTeX v5.0 Author Guide for a few notes on its most common uses.
A number of macros for journal abbreviations are available. These are listed in Table 1 of the AASTeX v5.0 Author Guide.
Figure captions or legends are included in the manuscript on a separate page using the \figcaption command:
There should be a \figcaption command for every legend in the paper.
When the \figcaption command is used, the figure identification, e.g., "Figure 1," is generated automatically by the command itself, so there is no need to key it. The optional argument, filename, can be used to identify the PostScript file for the corresponding figure. The key in the \label command can be used to produce figure citations in the text using \ref.There is support in the AASTeX package for tables via two mechanisms: LaTeX's standard table and tabular environments and the deluxetable environment. Tables may be marked up using either mechanism although use of the deluxetable environment is preferred. Authors should not use the LaTeX tabbing environment or the \hline command for electronic submissions.
LaTeX permits the preparation of fairly complex tables with arbitrary spacing, straddle heads and rules, and the like. Authors who need to specify complicated column headings and so forth are advised to consult the LaTeX manual (Lamport, 1985) for details. Most of the capabilities are applicable to AASTeX's deluxetable environment as well as LaTeX's tabular environment.
The deluxetable environment is delimited by LaTeX's familiar \begin and \end constructs. The content consists of preamble commands and table data, the latter delimited by the \startdata and \enddata commands:
There are several items in the deluxetable environment that must be given before the data for the table; they constitute the preamble to the environment
Use the \tabletypesize command with one of the font sizing commands below to reduce the font size of the table should it be too wide to fit on the printed page:
These commands reduce the type size to 11 points, 10 points, or 8 points, respectively.
To force a table landscape or change its width, use:
In most instances, it should not be necessary to override LaTeX's default table orientation or width.
You can override LaTeX's automatic table numbering using
Note that LaTeX's equation counter is not incremented when \tablenum is used.
Specify the table's title using the \tablecaption and the column headings using \tablehead.
The key in the \label command can be used to produce table citations in the text using the \ref command.
Within \tablehead, each column heading can be given in a \colhead, which will ensure that the heading is centered on the natural width of the column; this is the typical disposition of column headings, and the use of \colhead is encouraged. There should be a heading for each column, so there should be as many \colhead commands in the \tablehead as there are data columns. If more complicated column headings are required, any valid LaTeX tabular commands that constitute a proper head line for the table may be used.
After the table title and column headings are specified, data rows should be entered. Data rows are delimited with the \startdata and \enddata commands. The end of each row is indicated with the standard LaTeX \\ command. Data cells within a row are separated by & (ampersand) characters.
The journals often require that table cells for which there is no data be explicitly marked. This is to differentiate such table cells from blank table cells, which are frequently interpreted as implicitly repeating the entry in the corresponding element in the row preceding. Cells for which there are no data should contain a \nodata command; an appropriate symbol will be placed in that cell.
Within the deluxetable body, two kinds of "specialty" heads are available. A cut-in head is a piece of text that is centered on the table width; it is spaced above and below from the data rows that precede and follow it, and there may be rules associated, depending on the journal or manuscript style. All of these formatting particulars are managed by the style files. The author need only specify the text to be centered with a \cutinhead command. Similarly, a side head is a piece of text that is left-justified.
Table footnotes (more properly, table endnotes) may be used in the deluxetable environment; footnotes for tables are usually identified by lowercase letters rather than numbers. Marking and assigning associated text is achieved with the \tablenotemark and \tablenotetext commands, which function in the same manner as \altaffilmark and \altaffiltext (see above). The tablenotetext must be specified after the \enddata command and before the enclosing \end{deluxetable} since the text of notes to tables are displayed by that command.
AASTeX also supports special kinds of table endnotes.
Sometimes authors tabulate materials which have corresponding references, and it may be desirable to associate these references with the table rather than (or in addition to) the formal reference list. Use \tablerefs for this purpose. To append a short paragraph of explanatory notes that pertains to the entire table but is different than the caption, use \tablecomments.
Tables may be marked and composed using the standard LaTeX tools for tables, although the use of the deluxetable environment is encouraged. Tables should appear in the table environment.
The table data itself appears inside the tabular environment, where cols specifies the justification for each column. One of the letters 'l', 'c', or 'r' is given for each column, indicating left, center, or right justification. There should be only one tabular table per table environment. If the journal requests manuscripts with only one table per page, the author may need to insert a \clearpage command after especially short tables.
Authors are discouraged from using \hline to produce horizontal rules. Use \tableline instead. Vertical rules are typically forbidden by editorial preference.
Override table numbering using \tablenum. Format table endnotes in the same manner as in the deluxetable environment.
The last command in the electronic manuscript file should be the
command, which appears after all the material in the paper. This command directs the formatter to perform assorted termination activities and finish processing. LaTeX will ignore anything placed after the \end{document} command.