Drafting a Manuscript with Latex

1. Start with a working template. AGU has produced good templates over the years, and Patrick Daly has modified these to yield clear results. (See his comments.) Here are some appropriate files:

A manuscript template: paper.tex
A sample bibliography: paper.bib
The AGU class file: aguplus.cls
The AGU manuscript style file: agums.sty. For other AGU purposes, you might need some of the other AGU style files. You can download the whole set as a tar file: agu.tar, although my version appears old and probably buggy; newer collections should be available elsewhere.
An AGU bibliography style file: agu.bst or the same thing modified for American Meteorological Society journals: jpo.bst. To get proper parentheses for American Meteological Society publications, you'll also need to have one line changed in the class file. This version takes care of that: aguplus_ams.cls.

2. Type your manuscript. A few ground rules for Latex:

Type plain text using any editor. Latex files are processed later, so the presentation of the text file doesn't matter much.
Double space between paragraphs (i.e. press return twice).
In English, extra space is normally included at the ends of sentences. Latex does this automatically, unless the sentence ends with a capitalized abbreviation. (e.g. This paper is about the ACC.) In that case, insert "\@" before the period to force double spacing.
Latex will double space after all lower-case words ending with periods. To override this, place a backslash after the period. (e.g. J.\ Geophys.\ Res.).
One of the main virtues of Latex is that it handles equations effectively. Check a latex manual for guidelines on equations. Or check out this short guide from the American Mathematical Society web site.
For a general overview, you might consult this Not so short introduction to LaTeX

3. Figures should be encapsulated postscript. If your software does not place tight bounding boxes on the figures, you can hand edit the bounding boxes, which are normally defined in the second line of the eps file.

4. The bibliography file (filename.bib) can be created in emacs, which has an appropriate interface. Note that author names need to be separated by the word "and". They should either be in the form, "Smith, A. B." or "A. B. Smith" (and note that you must include a space between first initials.) If you use the emacs template, after you fill in available information, type ^C-^C to clean up the entry.

5. To convert your raw text file (filename.tex) into postscript use the following procedure:

latex filename
bibtex filename
latex filename
latex filename
dvips -f -tletter filename >! filename.ps

If you like to proofread compact documents, you can use psnup to put two pages of manuscript on every page.

psnup -2 -pletter filename.ps >! filename.ps2

6. To make pdf files instead of postscript, there are two options:

Use ps2pdf to convert your postscript. To make this work properly, use:

dvips -f -tletter -Ppdf -G0 filename >! filename.ps
ps2pdf filename.ps

Alternatively, run pdflatex rather than latex. Note that pdflatex does not accept postscript figures, so you will have to convert each figure to pdf, png, or jpg.

7. See this page for comments on choosing a journal for your manuscript.

Sarah Gille, September 2003; minor updates June 2005, November 2006.