REVTeX 4 Home Page

Status of REVTeX 4

August 3, 2001: REVTeX 4 released (finally!). Please send all comments to revtex@aps.org

REVTeX 4 Compuscripts

Papers prepared using REVTeX 4 are now eligible for compuscript status provided they are prepared according to the new APS Compuscript Guide for REVTeX 4 (see Documentation). After a short transition period (less than one month), the rules in this guide will be strictly enforced. Papers that do not follow the guidelines may be delayed in production and/or may have errors introduced due to rekeying. Page charge discounts will not be applied to papers that don't follow proper REVTeX 4 usage. Authors will receive a detailed report of what needs to be addressed so that the paper qualifies as a compuscript. REVTeX 3 will be phased out over the next year and authors are encouraged to switch to REVTeX 4 as soon as possible.

Introduction to REVTeX 4

REVTeX 4 is a complete rewrite of REVTeX with a new set of design goals. The previous versions of REVTeX were quite restrictive in what authors were allowed to do and were generally not designed to interoperate with many of the other available style files and packages that many authors want to use. REVTeX has not kept pace with the advances of the LaTeX community in general and, thus, is becoming more and more inconvenient to work with. REVTeX 4 is designed to bring REVTeX back into the mainstream while at the same time making it a more valuable tool in our production process and for authors who circulate their work on their own.

Design Principles

The following design principles were incorporated into REVTeX 4:

• Make REVTeX fully compatible with LaTeX2e.
• Relax the restrictions in REVTeX that only served a purpose when REVTeX was being used to directly typeset journals.
• Rely on standard LaTeX2e packages for common tasks. Examples are graphics/graphicx, color, hyperref, longtable etc.
• Put emphasis on creating macros for making translation to SGML/XML easier.
• Provide better support for achieving look and feel of Physical Review.
• Improve front matter macros for tagging author names and affiliations.
• Improve back matter macros for tagging references. Actively promote the use of BibTeX.
• Incorporate new features to make REVTeX a desirable e-print format.

The improved tagging is designed to aid the peer-review and publication process from the moment a REVTeX paper is submitted.

Known bugs in the REVTeX 4

Here is a list of known problems:

• \listoffigures is broken.

Common problems (not bugs) when first using REVTeX 4

Here are some problems which are likely to crop up if you don't have a complete LaTeX 2e installation (as you might get with the teTeX or TeX Live distributions for instance).

Missing (or outdated) required packages

You will need the natbib package, url.sty, and bm.sty files at the very least. You may download them from here, but these may not be the most current version and are not considered part of the REVTeX distribution. To get the definitive versions, they should be downloaded from CTAN (www.ctan.org). If you are missing bm.sty, then you probably don't have an up-to-date LaTeX 2e distribution and you should update your entire distribution. At the very least, you should update the files in the tools directory macros/latex/required/tools as decribed below for bm.sty

natbib: This can be downloaded from CTAN from the directory macros/latex/contrib/supported/natbib . You need version 7 or higher.

url.sty: This can be downloaded from CTAN from the directory macros/latex/contrib/misc/url.sty or by following this link and scrolling down to "url.sty."

bm.sty (and others): macros/latex/required/tools/bm.dtx
To generate bm.sty from bm.dtx, you can either use the tools.ins that is in the same CTAN directory or use this bm.ins file (just latex it):

% This file requires docstrip version 2.4 or higher available from
% ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/unpacked/docstrip.tex
\input docstrip
\preamble

\endpreamble
\keepsilent
\askforoverwritefalse
\generate{
 \file{bm.sty}{\from{bm.dtx}{package}}
}
\endbatchfile

Documentation

Download REVTeX 4

The REVTeX 4 may be downloaded directly from here as revtex4.tar.gz or revtex4.zip. Alternatively, it may be downloaded via FTP from ftp://aps.org/pub/tex/macros/revtex/. REVTeX 4 is also available on CTAN.

Changes from REVTeX 3

The changes from REVTeX 3 are concentrated in 3 areas:

LaTeX 2e support

REVTeX is now firmly grounded in LaTeX 2e and has left LaTeX 2.09 behind. This has been LONG overdue. Standard LaTeX 2e packages will work with REVTeX 4 and authors are encouraged to use packages included with the LaTeX 2e distribution whenever possible.

Front matter markup

New commands for specifying authors, affiliations, alternate affiliations, collaborations, e-mail addresses, author homepages, and preprint numbers have been added. These are designed to aid in the electronic processing of a manuscript and to help authors include these items in their papers. New formatting options give authors an easy path to achieving the Phys. Rev. look and feel, such as formatting the front matter in a single column with the body of the paper in a two-column format.

Back matter markup

New BibTeX style files have been created that add additional markup to the \bibitem's to preserve the markup in the .bib file. For example, author names are marked up with \bibinfo{author}{A. A. Smith}. The only effect of the \bibinfo macro is to allow one to parse references for optimal use in linking and indexing. Authors are strongly urged to use the new BibTeX files when submitting to APS journals .

A complete list of specific differences between REVTeX 3 and REVTeX 4 is given in the new REVTeX documentation included with the REVTeX 4 distribution. See docs/differ.tex