Submitting and Revising

The cover letter that goes with your submission, the reply to your reviewers, and keeping track of where the paper is.

One project, the whole journey

A manuscript is not finished when it compiles. It goes to the journal with a cover letter, comes back with reviewer comments, goes out again with a point-by-point response, and after acceptance comes back once more as a proof. TeXpress keeps all of that in the same project, next to the manuscript it is about.

You reach every part of it from the Workflow list at the foot of the left-hand rail, on every page of a project: Manuscript, Cover letter, Reviewer response, Journal proof, and Settings. The page you are on is shown in bold green. None of these pages changes your manuscript. A cover letter reads it, a response points at it, and removing either one cannot damage the paper.

lock Locked until the manuscript has compiled once

Cover letter, Reviewer response and Journal proof show a padlock until your manuscript has been generated and compiled at least once. All three are written about a finished manuscript, so there is nothing for them to work from before that. Press Compile in the preview, or Generate TeX / ZIP, and they open. Compiling a letter on its own does not count. Once you have written a letter or imported a round of reviews, that page stays open, even if the compile history is later cleared.

timeline Where the paper is: the stage track

Above the Workflow links is a small track of six dots: Draft, Submitted, Under review, Proofreading, Accepted, Published. It is your own record of where the manuscript is, with the date each stage was reached.

You set it, not the journal. TeXpress does not talk to submission systems, so the stage moves when you move it. Open Project settings and use Current stage and Date reached in its left-hand rail. Saving one stage's date leaves the others as they were.
Click the track to see every date so far, with a link straight to Edit stage & dates. Escape or a click elsewhere closes it.
Your Dashboard shows the same track on every project, along with its next step: "Choose a journal", "Generate the manuscript", "Ready to submit", the number of reviewer points still to answer, "Import the journal's proof", or simply "Waiting on the journal" when there is nothing for you to do.
Reaching Accepted or Published is marked on the track for as long as the project sits there. You have earned it.

mail Cover letter

The letter to the editor that goes in with your submission.

The page has three parts. On the left, This letter draws on lists what the letter is built from: the journal and publisher, the manuscript title, the corresponding author and affiliation, the number of authors and the length of the abstract. All of it comes from your manuscript, so if something there is wrong, fix it on the Metadata tab or in Project settings (Change journal takes you there). In the middle are the letter options, and beside them the letter itself.

Letter options

Editor, if you know who handles submissions. Leave it empty for a general salutation.
Article type: Article, Review or Communication.
Tone: Formal, Confident or Concise.
Why this journal: pick up to three reasons (its scope, its readership, papers it has already published that you build on, a special issue, open access reach, or a methodological fit). Each one becomes a sentence.
Include: a novelty statement (the work is not under consideration elsewhere), a funding disclosure, the full list of authors and their affiliations, and suggested reviewers, one per line. Leave any of them unticked and it is left out.

Writing it

Write the letter with AI drafts it from your manuscript and your options in about half a minute. Once a letter exists the button reads Rewrite with AI.
You can also skip the AI entirely and write it yourself: click any paragraph of the letter and type. Edits save as you type.
Preview as PDF builds the letter as a PDF with your latest edits in it. The letter is laid out as a plain letter, not in the journal's two-column style, because that is what a cover letter is.
Versions in the top bar keeps every AI draft and every edit of yours that a rewrite would have replaced. A rewrite never silently overwrites your wording, and restoring an old version saves the current one first, so that is undoable too.
Download letter gives you Word (.docx), LaTeX (.tex), or a freshly compiled PDF.

Read the draft before you send it. The letter is written from your title, abstract and authors, and the AI can only be as specific as those are. It is a strong first draft that you sign, not a letter that signs itself.

forum Reviewer response

A point-by-point answer to every reviewer comment, exported as the letter journals expect.

Step 1: import the decision letter

Paste the editor's email into the box, or upload the PDF or Word file the journal sent (up to 25 MB), and press Split into points. TeXpress finds each reviewer and splits their comments into one card per point, keeping the journal's own numbering ("1.", "R1.2", "Comment 3"). The editor's covering paragraphs are recognised and not turned into comments.

No AI is used for the split, so the same letter always splits the same way and it costs nothing. If a letter is laid out unusually and the split misses something, fix it by hand: + Add reviewer, Add a point the split missed under any reviewer, and Remove point on any card.

Step 2: answer each point

Each card shows the comment, a Response box for your reply, and a status: No reply yet, Draft written, Answered, or No change needed. The box grows with your text, and everything saves as you type.
Draft with AI above a reply box drafts that one answer. Draft unanswered with AI drafts every empty reply at once, up to 12 per press; a longer letter just takes another press. Each AI draft is labelled "Drafted with AI, please check it" until you have.
What changed in the manuscript links the point to the section, figure, table or equation you changed in response. These are real links to items in your project, so they never go stale: delete the section and its link goes with it.
The reviewer chips above the cards (Reviewer 1, Reviewer 2, All) show one reviewer at a time. The rail on the left shows your progress, and holds the Decision (major revision, minor revision, reject and resubmit), the editor's name, and Quote each comment in the letter.

Step 3: export the letter

The Letter preview on the right shows the finished response as you work. Its Compile button builds the PDF.
Export letter gives you Word (.docx), LaTeX (.tex), a compiled PDF, or Plain text for submission systems that want the response pasted into a box.

A second round of reviews

Papers often go round more than once. The Review rounds strip above the cards lists every decision letter you have imported and which one you are looking at. Import another round starts the next one, and each round keeps its own points and replies. Remove this round deletes that letter and its replies only. Your manuscript is not affected.

auto_awesome What the AI buttons cost

Letters and replies have their own monthly allowance, separate from your extractions: 3 drafts a month on the free plan and 10 on the paid plans. A letter never eats into the allowance you need to convert a manuscript, and the other way round.
Each press of an AI button uses one draft: writing or rewriting a cover letter, drafting one reply, or one Draft unanswered run. The line under the button says how many you have left this month, and updates as you use them.
Everything else on these pages is free: importing and splitting a decision letter, typing, previews, compiling and every download.
On a shared project the drafts come from the project owner's plan, as every AI action does.
Reviewer comments are written by someone else, so they are treated strictly as text to answer, never as instructions to follow.

fact_check After acceptance

The last stop is the proof: your accepted paper laid out in the journal's final format, with their edits and questions. It has its own page in the same Workflow list, and its own guide: Journal Proofs.

arrow_back Previous Generating & Compiling Next Journal Proofs arrow_forward

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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