The Physical Review is published by the American Physical Society (APS). The APS Publications Liaison Office has developed a macro package called REVTEX which is designed to work with standard LATEX. REVTEX is distributed to interested authors along with sample papers and a user guide (Sutherland 1989), and authors are encouraged to write their articles for the Physical Review with REVTEX markup. The objective of REVTEX is to avoid the costs and time delays of keyboard entry, as well as to provide authors with their own means of producing markup and preprint versions of their manuscripts.
REVTEX has a preprint format (a LATEX substyle) that can be used for initial review; authors submit manuscripts (paper copies) of their articles to the editorial office, and the paper is refereed in the usual fashion. At some stage in the review process, the REVTEX source file (called a compuscript) will be requested from the author. Compuscripts may be submitted via floppy diskette, magnetic tape, or Bitnet. After a paper has been accepted, the author may elect to have the compuscript returned so that the author may make subsequent corrections, or changes can be made by staff at the production site.
The publishing offices of the AIP, which produces the Physical Review for APS, do not actually use TEX for their typesetting. Rather, they use a turn-key computer typesetting system called Xyvision. Xyvision has its own markup language, and the production staff at AIP has been trained in its use. However, Xyvision provides the tools to develop translators between various typesetting markup languages and the Xyvision internal system. The AIP has already implemented a translation between WordPerfect and Xyvision, and this summer will be developing a translation facility between TEX (i.e., the REVTEX macro package) and Xyvision. Other translators, such as to the industry-standard SGML, are likely to be developed as well.