LyX layouts for IEEE Open Journals

Sat Jan 2 09:14:14 UTC 2021

> On Dec 22, 2020, at 2:58 AM, list_email at icloud.com wrote:
> 
> The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has a series of new ‘open” journals which use a different Tex format than other IEEE journals.
> 
> A superficial inspection shows that the main difference is that the abstract and index terms span the entire width of the page whereas the traditional format confines those elements to a column width in the two-column format.
> 
> Does anyone know of a LyX layout or template for IEEE open journals?
> 
> The IEEE LaTex templates are a few clicks away from this text, "IEEE article templates,” on this page: https://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/create-your-ieee-journal-article/authoring-tools-and-templates/
> 
> Jerry

I am attaching herewith a candidate LyX template for the IEEE Open Journals.

The IEEE LaTeX template, open.tex, is derived from the IEEE Transactions on Magnetics template, but with differences. I was able to make this new template by making a mash-up of the LyX templates IEEEtran-Journal.lyx and IEEEtran-TransMag.lyx, and with a minor and normally unnecessary addition to the LaTeX preamble section of the new template. I did not find it necessary to make a new layout file but this might be desirable for a minor feature mentioned below.

The template passes the follow test:

1. Open a copy of the template.

2. Import open.tex, the IEEE LaTeX template, into a new LyX document.

3. Perform the following five copy-pastes from open.tex as opened in LyX into the new template:
   * Title
   * Authors
   * Abstract
   * Index terms
   * The entire remainder of open.tex

4. Just for this test, because of the annoying note after the index terms which would never appear in an actual paper, convert the style of that note to “Standard in Title.” Also, just for this test, change the position of Figure 1 from “Default” to “Top."

5. Render to PDF.

6. Send the new PDF and the IEEE’s open.pdf to https://www.diffchecker.com/pdf-diff/.

7. Observe that the very few differences are completely trivial and not a fault of the template.

I have these notes:

* The IEEE’s open.tex has the title of the first section in all caps. In the template this is only an initial cap. Surely this is an error in the IEEE file.

* The IEEE’s open.tex lacks an author photo feature. Examination of papers in one IEEE open journal shows author photos, thus the template contains this feature.

* open.tex contains no BibTeX bibliography, only in-file references. The IEEE requires references to be in-file for the final version but some authors will prefer to work with BibTeX up to the final version, bringing references in from the .aux file, so this feature was brought over from IEEEtrans-Journal.lyx. (Does LyX offer an automatic way to import references from .aux? How about a new feature?)

* There are three main kinds of differences between a bare_jrnl.tex and bare_jrnl_transmag.tex, reflected in six non-trivial differences when diff-ing the tex files. The first is the formatting of authors, affiliations, and thanks. The second is the placement of \maketitle. (This second difference interacted with the annoying note to cause a problem noted earlier in this thread regarding non-title layouts.) These differences were reconciled in the mash-up so that the appearance agrees with the new open format.

* The third difference is that open.tex does not contain the optional “Special Paper Notice” whereby “Invited Paper” appears in italics; this is present in normal Transactions papers (but only those that were invited) including the corresponding LyX template. I suppose that there might be the need for this feature in some IEEE Open Journal papers but I was not able to fix it. I tried commenting out the line "NoStyle Special_Paper_Notice” in IEEEtran-TransMag.layout but to no affect. Fixing this minor issue will require a bit more investigation and possibly making a separate layout file for the new template. For reference for anyone looking into this, IEEEtran.layout, which IEEEtran-TransMag.layout imports, contains this passage:

Style Special_Paper_Notice
  CopyStyle	Title
  LatexName	IEEEspecialpapernotice
  InTitle	1
  Font
    Shape	Italic
    Size	Large
  EndFont
End

* The IEEE’s open.tex uses Computer Modern for math symbols but published papers use Times. I adhered to the style of open.tex, preferring to let the IEEE deal with this particular bit of shabbiness. Maybe they won’t mind if authors make the switch on their own.

* I don’t know why, in the test sequence above, I had to change the float placement of Fig. 1 from Default to Top, in order to get a match with the IEEE’s open.pdf. Default places it at the bottom of a column but Top places it under the table in the next column, near the top.

* While the template results in a successful test as described above, there might be some ‘hidden” differences in the generated .tex file. For example, the way in which the page heading ("REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR PAPER IDENTIFICATION NUMBER”) is coded is different in the Magnetics .tex than the normal Transactions .tex. Feel free to fix this.

* Users of the new blank template will notice that it looks nearly identical to the more familiar blank IEEEtrans-Journal.lyx and wonder what all the fuss was about. That’s good. :-)

I invite anyone to try out the new template and if there is a consensus after any improvements propose that it be added to the LyX distribution, while noting that people who are more expert than I will probably want to make changes.

Jerry

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