The layout of Annals papers
The Annals of the BMVA (or Annals for short) is a journal whose principal medium is online; papers are made available as PDF documents. Hence, there are three criteria for the way in which papers are presented:
It is expected that the vast majority of readers will peruse papers from the Annals using a PDF reader (e.g., Adobe’s Acrobat Reader). Reading two-column layouts online is a nuisance, so the Annals uses a single-column layout and with a typeface that is reasonably well-suited to online viewing.
When prepared using tools that support embedding hyperlinks within PDF documents (e.g., pdfLATEX), cross-references within documents are ‘live’ and allow the reader to navigate between, for example, a citation and its corresponding reference.
When an Annals paper is committed to hard-copy, the majority of readers will do so onto A4-sized paper, so the font size is chosen to facilitate reading single-column text on A4-sized paper.
This means that Annals papers look quite different to those in most scientific journals, where the constraints of commercial publishing mean that the maximum amount of text needs to be squeezed into the minimum amount of paper. Hopefully, the result is a publication that looks beautiful both online and when committed to paper.