Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Spent my evening sweating over an attempt to reform my paper for publication. What should have been a simple task — swapping out the IEEE template and replacing it with the Wiley one — took far long than it should have done to smooth out.

After fixing the bibliography to get it to work with amsrefs, I then spent some time trying to debug the final end-of-document page which contained nothing but an empty ruled box. After much examination both of the template and of the example document, I found a bit of code that inserts the contents of \jnlcitation on the last page; but because I'd omitted my self-citation, the template had added an empty box on a blank page.

With these problems resolved, I now need to set the \articletype property — I've emailed the editors for suggestions — and I should be done. Rather annoyingly, I haven't been able to do any of this at work because our version of LaTeX is so old, the majority of the supporting packages needed by the template are either missing or cough up an endless stream of errors when involved. MacTex, on the other hand, works flawlessly straight out of the box.

After deciding that the time had come to knock the rust off my sadly neglected TeX skills, I sat myself down and started to write a new document class to format one of my routine tasks. Everything went well until I decided to add an optional argument and some condition code to change the line spacing rules:

   \newif\if@doublespace
   \@doublespacefalse
  
   % Declare and process the class options
   \DeclareOption{double}{\@doublespacetrue}
  
   \if@doublespace
     \renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{2}
   \fi

LaTeX seemed to like the class well enough to run through it without objecting, but not well enough to actually change it's behaviour when I specified "\documentclass[double]{myclass}". After running a bunch of tests which involved hardwiring the conditional and setting the option with \ExecuteOptions I eventually realised that my code was working fine but I'd simply forgotten to include a \ProcessOptions call to actually pick the options up...

The moral of the story: it's always the simplest thing that comes back to bite you.