Design by Template in a Production Macro Package

The American Mathematical Society has been involved in the development of TEX from the beginning and began using it for journal production ten years ago; we now produce nearly all of our publications (a couple of dozen journals and book series) with TEX, using AMS-developed macro packages. One of the goals set for a major overhaul of the primary in-house macro package, begun in 1992, was to make revisions to the visual design of a given publication easier. In the new version of the macro package the design specifications for a particular document element (such as an article title) are not embedded in TEX code, but are entered into an element specs template that is comparatively easy to read and modify, and that corresponds more directly to traditional book design specs (e.g., vertical spacing is expected to be given in base-to-base terms).