>> Phillip Helbig <[log in to unmask]>: >>Are there a lot of authors >> writing papers in several English dialects simultaneously? > >Well, my next paper I intend to submit to the Monthly Notices of the >Royal Astronomical Society, who in their style guide say `please use >British spelling'. Part of this might be recycled for, say, a >conference proceeding (or the other way around) published by, say, an >American publisher who is equally adamant about using American spelling. This sounds like an ethics violating from the part of the involved scientific journals. The question should be brought up before the ethics committee of an international scientific association. In general, I think authors would be expected to write scientific papers in an acceptable scientific style of their choice; if the journal then wants to alter that style, they should engage its own personnel. If a paper is rejected on basis of style, it is an ethics violation of that journal, and that should be pointed out. Journals that do not follow this cannot be labelled scientific journals, just as those that do not demonstrate proper refereeing procedures. Clearly, the purpose of a scientific journal is not to present material in a particular style, but to present scientific results; the style is subordinate to that, only serving the purpose of aiding the communication of those scientific results. I understand well that this is not the reality of today: In fact, there is a strong tendency of forcing authors doing the work that typesetters should do. Physicists are inventing typesetting standards which are really not possible to write mathematics in, and so on. I do not think there is a case of a scientific journal that is labelled as non-scientific regardless of how much rules they break. But the reason it is going on like that is that nobody protests. I can give one example, in order to make this more explicit: In traditional math, it is common to label only important equations, and those that are referred to. This is a way to communicate information to the reader. However, I have noticed that some applied journals require equation numbers on pretty much all equations. This is not not to be considered a journal style really, but a request to the author to alter some of the semantic contents (as the information communicated to the reader is changed). In fact, I think the AMS packages had to implement special commands in order to accomodate this common mathematical style, because LaTeX does not permit it. Returning to LaTeX3, I think Frank Mittelbach said that the idea is to serve the user community. So this seems to imply that one should such special commands in order to serve the user commounity. But on the other hand, it can be hard to accommodate various whims by journals. For example US and UK English do not differ only in choice of spelling for different words, but also in choice of words and in some cases, the grammar, too. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:[log in to unmask]> * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>