Troubleshooting

You never placed it. Unlike a figure or a table, an equation is not a float, so there is nowhere sensible to park one that has no home in the text: it is simply not rendered. Go to the Content tab, put your cursor where the equation belongs, and press the Eq button in the toolbar. This is the single most common "where did it go" report.

Same cause, gentler outcome. A figure or table you never placed is appended at the end of the body rather than dropped. Insert a Fig or Tab marker where it should be mentioned and compile again.

That is normal LaTeX behaviour, not a fault. Floats move so that pages do not end with a large empty gap, and this is how every journal-formatted paper is produced. Setting Placement to Here makes the request as strong as it can be, but the layout engine still has the last word. Reviewers read papers laid out this way every day.

Expected, and unavoidable. A .tex file contains references to image filenames, not the images themselves. Every figure came through with its caption, label and placement intact, and is waiting for you to drop the image onto its card on the Figures tab.

Those fields print only where the journal's own author block has somewhere to put them, and most do not. Author biographies and photos in particular are an IEEE convention. Your data is stored either way, so it appears the moment you switch to a journal that uses it. Nothing is lost.

A reference prints only when a Cite marker in your text reaches it. The References tab marks every entry Cited or Not cited, so check the one you expected. If you typed a citation by hand rather than using the Cite button, the key you typed may not match any entry: delete it and insert it from the picker instead, which cannot go wrong. An entry with a cross beside it is missing its key or its title, and needs both before it can print properly.

Leave them uncited. An entry prints only when your text cites it, so anything marked Not cited stays in the project as a working library and simply does not print. You do not have to delete anything to keep your bibliography clean. If one is printing that you did not expect, a Cite marker somewhere still points at it: Find & replace will not find it (it never touches citations), so look for its chip in the text.

Reading a formatted reference list back into structured fields is genuinely hard, and this is the part of extraction most worth checking. If you have a .bib from your reference manager, upload it on the References tab: it is read exactly as written, with no AI in between, and it will be right.

No journal is selected, so there is nothing to pour your content into. The preview's Compile button waits for the same reason. Open Project Settings, or click "Choose a journal" in the banner at the top of the tab, pick a journal, and both become active. If your journal is not listed, choose the publisher's generic option or request it.

The editor was redesigned in September 2026, and a few things moved. Journal proof, Cover letter and Reviewer response are now in the Workflow list at the foot of the left-hand rail. LaTeX view is now the Tab as LaTeX switch at the right end of the tab row. The per-section TeX button, Move to appendix and Find & replace live on the Content tab's toolbar and its ⋮ menu. The ENV cross-reference button is now called Ref, and Insert Env is Env. The tour of the new layout is on The Editor.

It is collapsed. Click the thin strip on the right edge of the window, or press Preview at the right end of the tab row. Drag the divider between your text and the PDF to widen it; the editor remembers the width you choose.

You are not meant to. If the failure showed up in the preview, follow its link to the LaTeX editor first. The plain-English window that opens there is the part to read; the log underneath is there for when you want the exact line. The common failures and their fixes are listed on Generating and compiling. If the message names a font, or says the compile service was unavailable, the problem is on our side and you should tell us.

The offending character usually looks almost identical to a normal one: a curly quote instead of a straight one, an en dash instead of a hyphen, a typographic minus instead of a hyphen, or a maths symbol pasted into a sentence. The message names the field it is in. Retype that short stretch of text rather than hunting for the character, and wrap any genuine maths in $...$.

It is a good try, not a guarantee, and the button says so. It is strong on mechanical breakage and weak on intent: it cannot know which symbol you meant. If a second attempt does not help, fix the error in the tab it came from and regenerate, or send us the project.

Look for a "Manual LaTeX edits active" badge and a matching banner on the tabs. Once you save an edit in the manual LaTeX editor, that text is what compiles and the tabs stop feeding it. The banner offers three ways out, all of which snapshot your edits first: discard them, keep the LaTeX as final, or re-import it back into the tabs with AI. If there is no such badge, simply press Compile in the preview (or Recompile on the LaTeX page): the PDF you are looking at is from an earlier run.

Press Report issue, next to the compile log and in the error window. It sends us your project, the journal and the exact errors on your screen, so there is no setup to describe. You will get a notification under the bell in the header when it is resolved, with a link back to the project. See Generating and compiling.

That journal allows fewer heading levels than you used, and you were warned and asked to confirm before it happened. No text was deleted: a heading past the limit becomes a bold lead-in at the start of its paragraph, in the right place in the document. Switching back to a journal that allows more levels does not restore the heading structure automatically, so if you were only trying the other journal out, restore the snapshot from Activity.

You are at your journal's heading-depth limit. The button is hidden rather than disabled so it does not offer you something that cannot work. Either restructure slightly, or check whether the journal really is that strict.

One of them is a section you created on the Content tab. The bibliography is built automatically from the References tab, so delete the hand-made one. The same applies to a hand-made Acknowledgements or Funding section: those belong on the Declarations tab, which places them correctly in the back matter.

Labels are unique across the whole project, not just within one tab, because a cross-reference has to point at exactly one thing. The message names the item that already owns the name. Prefixing by type (fig:, tab:, eq:, thm:) makes collisions almost impossible.

All three unlock once the manuscript itself has compiled successfully at least once, because each is written about a finished manuscript. Press Compile in the preview and wait for the PDF. Compiling a letter on its own does not count. A letter or review round you have already started always stays open.

The split follows the letter's own layout: reviewer headings, then numbered comments, then bullets, then paragraphs. An unusually formatted letter can come out lumpy. Fix it on the page rather than re-importing: Add a point the split missed under a reviewer, Remove point on a card, and + Add reviewer for one it did not find. If an uploaded file splits badly, try pasting its text instead.

Cover letters and reviewer replies have their own monthly allowance (3 drafts on the free plan, 10 on paid plans), separate from your extractions, and each press of an AI button uses one. It resets at the start of each calendar month. Until then you can still write and edit the letter or the replies yourself, preview, compile and download them; only the AI drafting waits. Details are on Submitting and revising.

The AI writes from your title, abstract, authors and the reviewer's comment. It does not know what you actually changed in the paper unless you say so, so edit the draft directly, and link the section, figure or table you changed under What changed in the manuscript. Every AI reply is labelled "Drafted with AI, please check it" for exactly this reason. On a cover letter, a rewrite never loses your own wording: Versions keeps it.

TeXpress does not talk to journal submission systems, so the stage only moves when you move it. Open Project settings and set Current stage and, optionally, the Date reached in its left-hand rail. The dashboard, the stage track and the next step all update from that.

A long or figure-heavy manuscript takes a few minutes, and you can safely leave the page and come back. If it really has stalled, the progress screen grows a "This is taking too long" section with the options to retry, to open the editor empty and work by hand, or to start over with a different file.

The error screen offers Try again, which cleans the failed attempt away completely so it does not sit on your dashboard using a project slot. A failure that produced nothing usable does not count against your monthly allowance.

Uploads are capped at 25 MB, and your plan sets a page limit per document. The check runs before the project is created, so you stay on the form and can just pick a different file. A scanned PDF with no text layer cannot be read at all: we need selectable text, not an image of a page. For a document over the page limit, either upgrade or split it.

Only uploads and the AI actions on your manuscript (Fix with AI, re-import) spend extractions. Cover letter and reviewer drafts have their own separate allowance, so they are unaffected. Everything else stays open: you can keep writing, generating, compiling and downloading in every project you already have. Your Profile page shows the meter and exactly what used it. The allowance resets at the start of each calendar month, and the pricing page covers upgrading or adding your own API key.

Check whether the missing part was in a text box, a header or footer, a footnote, or an embedded object. Those sit outside the normal flow of a document and are the usual casualties. Paste the missing text into the right section by hand; it is quicker than re-running an extraction, and it costs nothing. Uploading the Word file rather than the PDF avoids most of this.

It is archived. Switch the dashboard to the Archived tab and press Restore. Archived projects are read-only by design so that an old draft cannot be edited by accident. Everything in it is intact.

Shared projects have their own tab, next to Active and Archived. If it is not there either, the invitation went to a different email address than the one you signed in with.

You were given view access rather than edit access. You can read every tab and download the compiled PDF. The project owner can change your access from the Share panel.

It is not supposed to. The journal's layout comes from its LaTeX class file, which Word cannot reproduce, so column breaks, spacing and the exact reference style differ. What the Word file gives you is your complete content in an editable document: headings, tables, figures, real Word equations and your reference list. Use it for co-author review and track changes; send the PDF or the ZIP where the format matters.

It lives on the LaTeX and PDF page, next to the PDF and ZIP buttons, and it is hidden while manual LaTeX edits are active. The Word export is built from your structured content, and once you hand-edit the LaTeX that content no longer describes what compiles, so exporting it would quietly give you a stale document. Discard the manual edits, or re-import them into the tabs, and the button comes back.

Reload the page with a hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R, or Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac). A browser holding an older copy of the page is the usual cause, especially just after we ship an update. If it persists, tell us which button on which tab and we will reproduce it.

Open Activity (the clock icon in the editor's top bar). It lists recent changes and your snapshots, and a snapshot is taken automatically before anything that could overwrite content in bulk. Restore the one from before the change. If you cannot find it, contact us with the project name and roughly when it happened, before making more edits.