LaTeX for Academic Publishing: What Journals Actually Require (And What's Optional)

A practical guide based on real journal submission experience - not the textbook version. "Submit in LaTeX" covers a lot of ground. Some journals require it strictly. Others accept Word but strongly prefer LaTeX. A few say "LaTeX preferred" and mean "we'll accept either but we'll reformat your Word document and it will look different from what you submitted." After handling LaTeX formatting for academic papers across IEEE, ACM, Springer, Elsevier, MDPI, and arXiv at The LaTeX Lab, here's what we actually know about what different publishers require, where submissions break, and what matters most. Which Publishers Actually Require LaTeX Effectively mandatory: IEEE - all Transactions, Letters, and conference proceedings. IEEEtran is the required class. Submitting Word gets your paper reformatted by the editorial office, often with formatting that doesn't match what you intended. ACM - all venues using the acmart class (SIGCHI, SIGCOMM, PLDI, etc.). Their submission system accepts PDFs bu