Instructions for submission in Word format

Providing a document in Word format is problematic for a few reasons.

1. Translating from the proprietary .doc format into LaTeX is not straightforward. Copy and pasting from Word into a LaTeX editor loses all formatting, formulas, and structure. Currently, our method is to convert the .doc file into .docx using a recent version of Word, and then process the resulting collection of slightly less proprietary XML files into a single .tex file, using this application: chbrown.github.io/xdoc/. Even with the preprocessing step, making the LaTeX look like the original Word document is arduous.
2. Word encourages using a variety of colors, font-faces, and font-varieties, like boldface, small-caps, sans-serif, etc. Reducing those into a subset suitable for S&P is hard, because it’s sometimes hard to tell what the different styles signify.
3. Word does not enforce bibliographic or referential consistency. It’s easy to change an example and not realize that a reference to that example didn’t get updated. And it’s easy to introduce a citation in the main text while forgetting to include the full reference in the bibliography. Errors like these become apparent when converting to LaTeX, which enforces correctness of all references, but hard to resolve in many cases, where it is unclear which example the broken link was meant to refer to, or which article an author and year refer to.

Nevertheless, we will accept submissions of any typesetting choice, and will work with you to make sure the final product is up to both S&P’s and your standards. Just note that turnaround time on Word submissions is a great deal longer than LaTeX, due to these additional complications.

Requirements and guidelines

The following pointers will ensure that the automatic conversion step goes more smoothly.

Where I specify explicit steps below, I’m referring to Word for Mac 2011, which is the version I happen to have on my computer. Modern versions of Word all write to the same .docx “Office Open XML” format, so your version may have slightly different steps, but will end up in the same format.

Some of the steps below may incorporate psuedo–LaTeX markup, but all of these steps are meant to be performed in Word. Your Word document may not look as pretty after this process, but a lot of pretty is inevitably lost and has to be recreated in the Word → LaTeX conversion; the following helps ensure that none of the semantics are lost. At this stage, correctness of document structure is always preferable to visual appearance within Word.

• Use Word’s Spelling & Grammar checker. Many of its judgments can be opinionated or obviously wrong, but it catches other typos, like unintended double spaces. These coalesce to single spaces when using LaTeX, but they can cause headaches for other reasons during the conversion process. Starting out with an as-clean-as-possible document avoids potential pain points when doing pattern matching down the line in the conversion process. After the first stage of the conversion process, the document will be in LaTeX, and there’s no going back. If typos turn up after this stage, they will have to be corrected in the LaTeX, not in the original Word document.
• Paragraphs should be indented with Word’s ruler indentation (or via menu: Format → Paragraph… “First Line Indent” setting), rather than manually with a tab character.
• Ensure that the document has proper metadata.
  • File → Properties...
    • You should fill in the Title, Author, and Keywords inputs.
• Your abstract should be at the beginning of the paper.
  • It should be immediately preceded by a line with only the text <abstract>
  • and immediately followed by a line with only the text </abstract>
  • This is non-standard syntax, but will help the converter know what part to format as the abstract.
• Use only one font, with only normal, bold, italic, or small-caps styles. You should only use one font size in the body of your paper, except for subscripts and superscripts (which Word naturally sizes smaller).
  • If you must use more than one font, underlining, or different font sizes, provide a separate postscript document or a page at the end of your document describing what each font and font style designates. We prefer italics over underlining in S&P papers, so if you absolutely need to use underlining instead of italics, or want to use both, please explain why underlining is required, and how it differs from your use of italics.
• Use built-in Word styles for sections and subsections headings.
  • “Heading 1” for sections, “Heading 2” for subsections, and “Heading 3” for subsubsections. You can restyle these, if needed, but the names must not be changed.
  • Section headers should not contain literal numbering.
• If you use unusual symbols, include a list of each symbol its intended meaning in a postscript. I would not consider, for example, ∈, ⊉, or ∝, unusual, but if you use them in atypical ways, or if you use common but potentially ambiguous symbols, like ⊗ or ⤳, or particularly odd ones like ⋵ or ⊼, describe them in the postscript, so that we will know which LaTeX symbols to resolve them to. Include the Unicode character name if possible.
• Examples should be numbered continuously throughout your document, except for examples in footnotes, which should be independently numbered, and should not be referred to outside the footnote.
  • Use Word’s “Fields,” not literal numbering. You are not required to use Word’s built-in field, NumberDefault, but it’s probably the easiest way:
    1. Insert → Field...
    2. Enter LISTNUM NumberDefault \L 4 into the text box and click OK (\L 4 indicates parentheses surrounding an arabic numeral).
    3. You can repeat those steps to insert additional examples, or you can copy & paste the (1) entity as needed (and if it’s working, it will be automatically incremented with each instance).
  • Sub-examples should use Word’s basic ordered list formatting, and be in the same paragraph as the top-level example number. I.e., there should not be a line break between the top-level example number and the the sub-example list.
  • When referring to these numbered examples, use Word’s “Cross-reference” tool.
    1. Insert → Cross-reference...
    2. “Reference type” should be “Numbered item”
    3. “Insert reference to” should be “Paragraph number”
    4. “Insert as hyperlink” should be checked.
    5. “Include above/below” should not be checked.
    6. (If you right-click on the resulting entity and click “Toggle Field Codes” you should see something like { REF _Ref1234 \r \h }. Right-click and select “Toggle Field Codes” again to show the resolved reference.)
• The entire contents of an example or list item should ‘belong’ to the example or list item.
  • Use the key combination shift+enter to insert line breaks while not ending the example. Hitting “enter” after the last line of the example contents should cause Word to create the next example number, bullet point, or ordered list numeral. If it does not, that indicates the last line is already outside the body of the example, and should be fixed.
  • This is especially crucial for glosses, so that each line of the gloss is kept in the same group.
  • Copy and pasting can produce counterintuitive results, because the clipboard can contain information about the indentation or numbering of wherever the snippet was copied from, and the results of pasting somewhere may be visually correct, but structurally unsound.
• Linked references
  • All clickable (hyperlinked) references should go to the intended place. It is possible, in Word, to create a linked reference that takes you to Section 2, but looks like a link to example (2). Since it’s impossible to given anchor points meaningful names in LaTeX, the only way to check that a reference takes you to the right place is to click it.
  • Linked references to examples should contain the surrounding parentheses. I.e., you should be able to click the parentheses to follow the link. If the parentheses are literal, the automatic conversion will produce LaTeX that renders to something like “((31))” instead of just “(31)”.
• Use footnotes instead of endnotes. Any endnotes will be converted to footnotes.
• Figures
  • Include figures as separate files, preferably in vector format (we prefer .pdf, but we can also handled .ps, .eps, and .ai files), and insert the following markup into the Word document where the figures are intended to appear, e.g., for a file named “results-01.eps”, <figure "results-01.eps">.
  • Optionally, you may also specify the intended size of the figure in a postscript or readme accompanying your submission.
  • If you’ve used Excel to generate your figure, include the original Excel spreadsheet
  • Raster images should have a pixel resolution of at least 300 dpi
  • If you are including more than three figures as separate files, compress the .docx file and all of your figures and other attachments into a single .zip archive before submitting.
• Equations are especially difficult to convert automatically, so they should be typeset in LaTeX, potentially with one of the following WYSIWYG editors:
  • Online LaTeX Equation Editor (online)
  • HostMath equation editor (online)
  • LyX (Linux / Windows / macOS)
  • Wikipedia’s list of formula editors

  You should use the following markup to indicate which portions of your document are equations, and which are the LaTeX transcriptions:

  <equation><latex>\sum^{100}_{x=1} x^2 = 338350</equation>

  I.e., the nicely formatted (image) above is the formula in Word format, and the part between the <latex> and </equation> markup is the LaTeX code generated by the equation editor.

• Bibliography formatting
  • The bibliography should be provided in a structured format like BibTeX or some other widely-supported citation database that we can convert to BibTeX, e.g., Endnote or Mendeley.
  • Literal (unlinked) inline citations within the Word document should always be expressed in author-year format, e.g., “Heim 1984” or “Heim (1984)” or “(Heim 1984)”.
    • If there are duplicate author-year pairs, the years should be suffixed with ‘a’, ‘b’, etc. as needed.
    • Since we will attempt to link the inline citations in the paper to the correct references, you should be sure that each one uses the same (correct) spelling (including accents) as the bibliography.

All aesthetic requirements in the style guidelines apply to Word documents as well, with preference given to the directives on this page if there are any conflicts.

Automatic validation

There is an online validator in the works. When it is ready, there will be a link to it here, and it will help you work through the preceding guidelines.