Page Charges. Historically, page charges for compuscripts have fluctuated. The Council has, at various points over the history of the program, voted for reduced page charges, the elimination of page charges, and full page charges for compuscripts.
The current APS policy is to request a discounted publication charge for articles submitted electronically to the Physical Review and Letters journals, provided they are in an acceptable file format and are printable/displayable at the Editorial Office. ( Reviews of Modern Physics does not request publication charges.) The discounts are journal specific. See a journal's inside front cover for exact charges or visit their World Wide Web home page via the URL http://publish.aps.org/.
Acceptable file formats for electronic submissions are, at the moment, REVTeX (preferred), LaTeX, Plain TeX.
Compuscripts versus Electronic Submissions. Electronic Submissions are manuscript files that can be used electronically in the APS editorial-review process. They are described in the preceeding paragraph. Compuscripts are electronic submissions that also meet the requirements for the APS production process; i.e., they have the correct tagging and coding (REVTeX !) to undergo direct software translation into a useable Xyvision/SGML production file. Compuscripts garner no additional discount for authors. Plain TeX and ``non-REVTeX '' LaTeX files do not offer the standard coding needed for the conversion.
Publication Schedule. The normal edtorial-review and production schedules apply to electronic submissions and compuscripts.
Compuscript Conversion. APS production files are in Xyvision or SGML format. The files are created via original keyboarding according to conventional manuscripts or via translation of an author's REVTeX file. It is no longer the case that REVTeX files serve as the actual production file that produces the final journal output.
For journal page composition, any low-level format coding in a compuscript file is effectively ignored in the conversion to the production file. Such is the nature of the SGML scheme: separation of the logical structioral elements (tagged items) of a document from the specification for the formatted output of the document content. The compuscript serves to code the elements; production composition software applies APS-standard format specificaitons. Extensive coding for low-level formatting details in a compuscript file may foil the translation process, and should be avoided.
Macros. Some authors use specialized definitions, or custom macros, in their files. These definitions serve different purposes: some macros save the author from typing a long character string repetitively (Type 1), and some macros act as commands to the TeX program (Type 2).
Type-1 macros enable the author to
define a frequently occurring string of characters as a shorter string, in
order to save typing time. These ``keystroke-saving'' macros are now
acceptable for APS compuscripts. They will be globally expanded by the
compuscript conversion software. If the resulting code otherwise meets
the requirements for APS compuscript files, all should be well. The
expansion should not lead to low-level formatting. Avoid recursive
definitions; include the Type-1 macros at the beginning of the file,
before the \begin{document} line; include only those used
within the given compuscript file. Refer to the Compuscript Booklets
(cf. xii) for more details.
Type-2 macros enable the author to give commands to the TeX program. Authors need to do this when the macro package they are using does not contain a command that they need and/or they are effecting low-level formatting.
Type-2 macros frequently occur in LaTeX compuscripts. This is because the macros do not provide for certain elements of APS style; for instance, letters in equation numbers. Authors who are using LaTeX to compose their compuscripts would need to develop a command that would number their equations (1a), (1b), etc.
Type-2 macros should not occur in REVTeX compuscripts. The REVTeX macros ideally represent a complete command set, allowing the author to do anything that APS edtorial style allows.
Type-2 macros are not easy to remove; therefore files containing them will be ineligible for the compuscript program.