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The Editor

What belongs on each tab, and the one rule that ties them together.

Read this first: why there are tabs at all

In Word you type everything into one long page, including the figures. TeXpress splits your manuscript by what each thing is instead. Your prose is on the Content tab. Your figures are on the Figures tab. Your equations are on the Equations tab. Nothing is lost and nothing is hidden, it is just filed by type.

This is what lets one journal switch reformat the whole paper. A figure that knows it is a figure can be given a number, a caption position and a column span by whichever journal you pick. A picture pasted into a paragraph cannot.

The cost of that is one new habit: you say where a figure belongs by dropping a marker into your text, rather than by dragging the image there. That is the PLACE button, and it is the next section.

Markers: PLACE, CITE and ENV

Put your cursor in a paragraph on the Content tab, press one of these buttons in the toolbar, pick an item from the list that opens, and a small coloured chip appears at the cursor. The chip is a single object: you can delete it, but you cannot type inside it.

PLACE

Fig, Tab, Eq. Refers to a figure, table or equation. In the PDF it prints as "Fig. 2" or "Table 1", numbered by the journal's own rules, and it tells LaTeX that this is where the item belongs. The first PLACE for an item is also what puts it into the document; later ones are just cross-references to it.

CITE

Cites a reference from your bibliography. Prints in the journal's citation style, [3] or (Smith, 2020) depending on the journal, and adds that reference to the bibliography at the end.

ENV

Refers back to a theorem, lemma, definition or algorithm you inserted earlier, even one in a different section. Prints as its number.

The rule that catches everyone once: a figure or table you never PLACE is added at the very end of the body rather than dropped, which looks wrong but is recoverable. An equation you never PLACE is not rendered at all. An equation is not a float, so there is no sensible place to park it. If an equation is missing from your PDF, this is why.

What is on screen everywhere

  • list The outline sidebar on the left lists everything on the current tab: your sections and their nesting, or your figures, or your references. Click an entry to jump to it. It is collapsible if you want the width back.
  • arrow_forward Previous and next at the foot of every tab walk you through them in order, Metadata to Declarations, ending on the Generate button. Following them once is a complete pass over your paper.
  • bolt Generate TeX / PDF sits top right on every tab. It is greyed out until you have chosen a journal. See Generating and compiling.
  • save There is no Save button. Fields save themselves as you leave them. The one thing to avoid is closing the tab in the same second you finish typing.
  • history Activity shows recent changes and your saved snapshots, which is where to go if you want to undo something big.
  • edit_document LaTeX view, just under the tab bar, shows the current tab as plain LaTeX, and on most tabs you can paste LaTeX back in and it becomes rows again. Ignore it entirely if you do not want it. Details at the bottom of this page.

description Metadata

Everything above the first heading of your paper.

  • Title, abstract and keywords. Keywords are entered one at a time: type and press Enter to make a chip. Bold, italic, superscript and subscript work in the title and abstract, which matters for chemical formulae and species names.
  • Research highlights appear only for journals that ask for them (Elsevier titles, mainly). One per line. They are kept if you switch to a journal that does not use them, so nothing is lost.
  • Affiliations first, then authors. Add each affiliation once as a line of text ("Dept, University, City, Country"). It gets a number. Then, on each author, tick the affiliations that apply. That is how one author ends up with two superscripts.
  • Author order is the printed order. Drag the handle, or use the up and down arrows.
  • Per author you can add an email, an ORCID, a short biography and a photo, and tick Corresponding author or Equal contribution. More than one corresponding author is allowed. Each of these prints only where the journal's style has somewhere to put it, so a missing ORCID in the PDF is usually the journal, not a lost field. Biographies and photos are an IEEE-style thing and will not appear in most templates.

segment Content

Your actual paper. Where you will spend most of your time.

Sections

  • Each section is a card: a heading you can click and rename, and a body you type into. Click the header row to fold it away.
  • The button on the right of a card adds a child section under it. The indent and outdent arrows move an existing section a level in or out, and the up and down arrows reorder it. Nesting can go up to six levels, or fewer if your journal allows fewer, and the button simply disappears at the limit.
  • The grey number to the left of a heading ("2.1") is an outline aid so you can see the shape of your paper. The real numbering in the PDF comes from the journal.
  • Mark a section as an Appendix and it moves to the back matter with the journal's appendix numbering.
  • Do not create a References section here. One is built automatically from the References tab. A hand-made one would be a second, duplicate list.

Writing in the body

  • The toolbar above each body gives bold, italic, superscript, subscript, bullet lists and numbered lists. What you see is what you get, there is no markup to learn.
  • Math inserts an inline symbol or expression using the visual equation builder. Use it for a lone λ or x² in a sentence. Full displayed equations belong on the Equations tab.
  • Pasting from Word or a PDF is cleaned up: formatting we support is kept, everything else is dropped rather than smuggled in.

Environments (theorems, proofs, algorithms)

+ Insert Env in the toolbar opens a two-step window: pick the type, then fill it in. The available types are Theorem, Lemma, Corollary, Definition, Proposition, Proof, Remark, Example, Conjecture and Algorithm.

  • Every environment needs a label, which is the short name you use to refer back to it (thm:main-result). Letters, digits, underscore, hyphen and colon, no spaces. An optional title prints in brackets after the number.
  • Numbering ("Theorem 1", "Lemma 2") is applied at compile time by the journal. Do not type numbers yourself.
  • The environment is anchored where your cursor was, and you can refer back to it anywhere with the ENV button.
  • Algorithms are entered line by line, not as a block of text. Each pseudocode step is its own line with its own indent control, so "for each i" and the two steps inside it are three lines at two indent levels. That structure is what lets us emit real numbered pseudocode in whichever algorithm package your journal uses, instead of a screenshot-shaped code block. Insert equation puts inline math into the line you are on.

image Figures

One card per figure. Drop the image in, write the caption, then PLACE it in your text.

  • Label is the short name you PLACE with. Keep it meaningful (fig:setup).
  • Placement is the LaTeX float hint: Here, Top of page, Bottom of page, or its own float page. It is a request, not a command. LaTeX moves floats to avoid ugly gaps, and every journal does this. If your figure lands a page later than you wanted, that is normal, not a bug.
  • Width scales the image relative to the text column. On a two-column journal there is also a toggle to make the figure span both columns.
  • Add two or more images to one card and it becomes a subfigure group automatically. Each image then gets its own small caption and its own sub-label ("2a", "2b"), and the card's caption becomes the caption of the whole group.
  • Vector figures are supported: upload a PDF or an EPS. EPS is shipped untouched in your download ZIP, because some publishers require it.
  • A figure with no caption still gets a number, so a cross-reference to it never prints as a question mark.

table Tables

A real grid you edit in the browser. No LaTeX table syntax anywhere.

  • Paste straight from a spreadsheet. Copy a block of cells in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers and paste into any cell: the grid grows to fit and fills outward from where you pasted. For a brand new table there is a Paste data button with a preview, a first-row-is-header option, and a delimiter override if your data is comma separated and contains commas.
  • Tab and Enter move between cells the way they do in a spreadsheet. Click a cell and its full text is editable in the box below, which is easier than fighting a narrow column.
  • Select two or more cells and press Merge to span columns. Unmerge puts them back.
  • Cells take bold, italic, superscript, subscript and inline math.
  • Caption above or below is a per-table choice, because journals disagree. Above is the usual convention for tables.
  • The style toggle switches between clean publication rules (booktabs, horizontal lines only) and a plain fully-ruled grid.
  • Placement and column spanning work exactly as they do for figures.

functions Equations

Displayed equations: the ones that sit on their own line and get a number.

  • Each card has a LaTeX source box and a live preview beside it, so you see the finished result as you type.
  • Not comfortable with LaTeX? Open the equation builder and build it by clicking. The LaTeX field fills itself in.
  • Numbered is a per-equation toggle. Numbering itself is the journal's job, so leave the number out of the source.
  • If the preview shows a warning, do not panic. The preview understands slightly less LaTeX than the real compiler does, so a warning is a hint to check, never a block on saving.
  • Remember: an equation appears in your PDF only where you PLACE it on the Content tab.
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menu_book References

Your bibliography. Four ways in, one way out.

Getting references in

  • Upload .bib from Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote or your reference manager of choice. Most accurate option, no AI involved.
  • Paste BibTeX for one entry you copied off a publisher page or Google Scholar.
  • Add Reference fills in a form (authors, title, venue, year) and builds the entry for you.
  • Anything extracted from your uploaded manuscript is already here, ready to be corrected.

The two rules that decide what prints

The tick beside an entry means "allowed into this manuscript". It is not a delete, and it is not a mark for later: an unticked reference stays in the project, keeps its details, and can be ticked again at any time. It simply does not go into the file the compiler reads.

A reference is printed only if it is ticked and actually cited with a CITE marker somewhere in your text. Both halves are required, which is deliberate: you can keep a working library of fifty entries in the project and submit with the twelve you used. Select All and Deselect All are there for when you want the other behaviour.

Citation is the half you cannot see from this tab, so the outline on the left marks it: a solid dot means a CITE marker somewhere in your text reaches that entry, a hollow dot means nothing cites it yet. A hollow dot on a ticked reference is the exact combination that produces an entry you expected to see and did not.

  • Each entry is editable in place. Depending on how it arrived you get either the structured form or the raw BibTeX, whichever matches what is stored.
  • Renaming a citation key offers to update every CITE marker that pointed at it, so a rename does not quietly break your citations.
  • The search box filters by title, author or key, which is the fastest way to find one entry in a long list.

gavel Declarations

The statements journals ask for after the conclusion. All optional.

  • Five have fixed, standard headings: Author contributions, Funding, Data availability, Acknowledgements and Conflicts of interest. Each one you fill in becomes its own unnumbered section at the end of the body, before the references. Each one you leave empty adds nothing at all.
  • Other declarations is for anything else your journal wants (ethics approval, consent to publish), with a heading you write yourself.
  • Nomenclature builds a symbol list. Use $...$ around maths, and give rows the same group name to cluster them under a subheading such as "Greek symbols".

Two things that apply across every tab

Labels are unique across the whole project

A figure, a table, an equation and an environment cannot share a label, even though they are different kinds of thing. If you try, you are told which item already owns that name. This is what makes a cross-reference unambiguous, and it is why a habit of prefixes (fig:, tab:, eq:, thm:) is worth adopting.

LaTeX view, for people who want it

The toggle under the tab bar shows the current tab as plain, journal-neutral LaTeX. On Content, Tables, Equations, Metadata, Declarations and References you can also edit that LaTeX and press Apply to visual editor to turn it back into rows, which makes pasting a chunk of an old paper very quick. Figures are read-only there, since no amount of text can restore an image.

Smaller TeX buttons on individual section, table and declaration cards do the same for one item.

Two safety rules you cannot switch off: an apply that would empty a populated tab is refused rather than obeyed (a parse that found nothing is a failed parse, not a delete instruction), and every apply saves a snapshot first, so a bad paste is always recoverable from Activity. This is not the same thing as the manual LaTeX editor you reach through Generate, which is covered on the next page.

Working with co-authors

Share in the project header invites someone by email as either an editor or a viewer. Anyone in the project sees a banner when another person is working in it at the same time. A shared project stays on the owner's plan: compiles and AI actions spend the owner's quota, never the collaborator's, and a viewer can read every tab and download the compiled PDF without being able to change anything.

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Still stuck?

The FAQs cover plans, quotas and data questions. For anything else, tell us what happened and we will look at your project.

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