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Is there any information about the trend of journals' preferences regarding LaTeX and MS Word?

My main concern is computer engineering and linguistics fields of study.

Real Dreams
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    I have no data to offer. My observation is that there are a few fields (mathematics, statistics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science, etc.) where LaTeX is preferred or even required. For the rest, LaTeX is discouraged or even forbidden (in favor of Microsoft Word). – GEdgar Mar 19 '14 at 14:24
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    FWIW, my LaTeX papers were re-written into Word in some economics and statistics journals that they were published in. Proofreading them was a horrible, disheartening experience. – StasK Mar 19 '14 at 15:02
  • In Computer Engineering, the ACM and the IEEE offer LaTeX templates as well as Word templates for the majority of their journals. I am a great fan of LaTeX as both an author and an editor, however the steeper learning curve tends to put people off using it. – eoinbrazil Apr 02 '14 at 16:18
  • Perhaps the recent question: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21972/journals-not-accepting-tex/21978?noredirect=1#comment46504_21978 is relevant to this one. – L Platts Jun 05 '14 at 15:42

3 Answers3

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Both ACM and IEEE accept LaTeX publication format, which represents computer engineering to a large extent.1

Based on this list which categorizes publications in various fields by their 'friendliness' to LaTeX (primarily linguistics-related), many linguistics publications accept LaTeX (especially those related to computational linguistics / natural language processing).2

1 Cf. http://acm.org/publications/latex_style/ and http://ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html.

2 The list was last updated in January 2010.

ff524
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citsonga
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I suppose you want to know the general acceptance of LaTeX to decide whether to invest effort in learning LaTeX. I feel LaTeX is the safe choice as, especially in Computer Engineering, LaTeX is widely used - ACM and IEEE have their own LaTeX submission templates. If, in the unlikely case that your publication venue requires Word only, there are LaTeX to Word converters available, e.g. latex2rtf and pandoc. The Tex Users Group (TUG) also maintains a list of converters. This thread and this one discuss conversion from LaTeX to Word.

Community
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wsaleem
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    @ff524 Thanks. I edited the answer to add a clarification. It still does not address the "trend" part of the question (which would be based on historical data of accepted formats). If the answer still seems inappropriate, please let me know if there is a way to simply convert it to a comment. – wsaleem Apr 29 '14 at 07:04
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    If you prefer to write a comment on the question instead, you can do so provided you have 50 rep and then delete your own answer. – ff524 Apr 29 '14 at 07:16
  • FWIW my previous biology manuscript was written in latex, and the conversion process to Word was a nightmare.Eventually I rewrote it using Word. Many biology journals require Word. –  Apr 30 '14 at 03:16
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There are numerous journals and conferences that only accept manuscripts in MS Word format. On the one hand, the journals and conferences that only accept LaTeX are rare.

Indeed, I don't remember any journal or conference that require LaTeX format exclusively.

Dave Clarke
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Prince Of Persia
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