Common Tweaks To the AGU Manuscript Templates

A couple of months ago I wrote about new manuscript templates from AGU, in both Word and LaTeX. There are two small issues with these templates, and here I will show you how to change them.

First, in the Word template, line numbering is not turned on by default. You have to do this yourself. It’s easy, though.

• Under the Format pull-down menu, select “Document”
• Click on the “Layout” tab at the top of the pop-up window
• Click on the “Line Numbers…” button
• Check the box for “Add line numbering”, click the button for “Continuous”, and click “Ok” (and then “Ok” again in the Document window)

Here’s the Document-Layout pop-up menu:

and here is Line Numbers pop-up menu:

            In the LaTeX template, the common issue that I hear people wanting to fix is the line spacing in draft mode. The normal way to do this is to insert this line after the \documentclass command:

\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{x.x}

where x.x is a multiplier for the spacing between the lines relative to the font size, such as 1.0 for single spacing or 1.2, 1.5, or 2.0 for larger line spacing. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to introduce new macros into the AGU LaTeX templates, so please do not use the line above.

Instead, you have to change the baseline setting in the auxiliary files. To do this:

• Open the “agujournal.cls” file, either in TeX or text editor
• Scroll about a third of the way down to the “Font Family Info” section
• Change the \draftskip setting to some other value
• Save the file and close it

Here is the section of agujournal.cls that you need to change (line 376):

As you can see, the draft setting is 20, while the font size is 12, so the default is a little more than 1.5 line spacing. If you want single line spacing in your draft document, then change this number to 12. I kind of like a setting of 15, which leaves just a bit of space between the lines but still keeps the text compact.

Of course, when you upload your paper_file.tex document into GEMS (which is not required at first submission, but is required for subsequent “revision” submissions), the GEMS system will use its unaltered agujournal.cls file to typeset your manuscript. This will undo what you just did. If you want the editor and reviewers to see the version with the tighter line spacing, then you have to replace the GEMS-generated PDF file of the merged manuscript document. Another advantage of uploading your own PDF is that you can control the placement of the figures within the manuscript; otherwise, GEMS will append them to the end of the manuscript file, without numbering or captions nearby. So, I strongly urge you to upload your own full-manuscript PDF into GEMS at that step in the submission process.

I hope this helps. If you have other little tricks you do to the templates, then please free free to share them in the comment section below.