The editors at the University of Chicago Press have produced an excellent set of instructions for authors and their publishers, If the guidelines provided in these pages are followed closely, authors can give publishers disks or tapes that can be used directly to produce a typeset proof.
Most scientists do, in fact, produce their typescripts using computers. Almost all printing now is done from an image produced by a computerized typesetter. Thus the goal is to match the author's magnetic medium to the typesetting computer.
The basic principles for achieving this seem surprisingly simple. In order to overcome the incompatibiities of a huge range of systems, authors use a generic coding system that is easy to learn. At the printer these codes are interpreted so that the various text elements, such as subheadings or captions, are identified and then correctly set.
For example, the code (ct) denotes that the text ...
