Phillip has raised the point of non-front matter issues of the standard journal class. To this I would like to comment as follows: 1. BibTeX: yes, there should be an officially approved bst file for each journal. BibTeX does not have to be obligatory, but it should certainly be available. With my makebst (aka custom-bib, merlin, genbst) generating such files is greatly simplified. Marcel's comment that making the bibliography by hand is trivial compared to the rest of the article makes me laugh and cry together. The bibliography (by hand) is far from trivial, if you want it right, and it is an enormous effort for really arbitrary, fiddly, piddly stuff. I would rather make up a bib file for a one-shot paper than manually make up a thebibliography listing. 2. Most journal style files (few issue classes) do include extra features for handling tables, figure captions, references, sublabelling equations. Much of this can be handled by existing packages, such as my natbib. It would therefore be better to recommend the standard packages that one should be able to use, such as the tools collection and amsmath. That is, a paper using the model journal class could include all these packages without having to submit them separately to the journal; he can assume they will be at any installation that contains journal.cls. 3. Abbreviations and spelling should not be accommodated in any such packages. The author can provide this himself. I did this in my Guide to LaTeX (and I even explain how I did it that book) and the publisher really did demand US spelling after saying British spelling would be okay at first. (Actually in the book I describe how one could do it; what I really did was \newif\USspell \USspelltrue \newcommand{\USUK}[2]{\ifUSspell #1 \else #2\fi} Now you can refer to \USUK{color}{colour} as you please, and just change the state of the \USspell flag to switch. You can even define \newcommand{\colour}{\USUK{color}{colour}} to simplify typing. (Note that \color is probably already taken.) 4. The journals I have written classes for want a manuscript first with the figure captions and tables all at the end, not included within the text. This is anarchistic today. However, I have a package figcaps that allows this. Either the figures appear as normal in the text, or the captions (and optionally the figures themselves) and tables are written to separate files to be reread at the end. I have not made this package public, but parts of it are available inside my class files. I use this as an example of some very complex things that some journals require. My suggestion for journal.cls would be to FORGET IT. A draft or manuscript option should be available (for single column, double spacing) but such juggling of figures and tables should be left out. Let the figures and tables appear in the manuscript text too. It is only out of historical reasons that these are to be listed at the end, from the bad old typewriter days. Those are my comments for now. Patrick ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Patrick W. Daly Tel. [+49] 5556-979-279 Max-Planck-Institut fuer Aeronomie Fax. [+49] 5556-979-240 Max-Planck-Str. 2 D-37191 Katlenburg-Lindau Internet: [log in to unmask] Germany -----------------------------------------------------------------------------